this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
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I support free and open source software (FOSS) like VLC, Qbittorrent, LibreOffice, Gimp...

But why do people say that it's as secure or more secure than closed source software?

From what I understand, closed source software don't disclose their code.

If you want to see the source code of Photoshop, you actually need to work for Adobe. Otherwise, you need to be some kind of freaking retro-engineering expert.

But open source has their code available to the entire world on websites like Github or Gitlab.

Isn't that actually also helping hackers?

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[–] TeamAssimilation@infosec.pub 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

It doesn’t literally mean that everyone that uses OSS will inspect the source code for vulnerabilities, most don’t even have the skill to do so.

It’s more secure because access to source facilitates exploiting it, and patching it, faster, and because nerds that do have the skills and find something unusual will delve into the code to debug it. The XZ Utils back door was found by one of such nerds doing beta testing, it didn’t even get to be distributed to general users.

It’s a telling sign that malicious actors nowadays are surreptitiously trying to compromise OSS through supply chain attacks instead of directly finding zero days. For example: StarDict sends X11 clipboard to remote servers

[–] towerful@programming.dev 4 points 2 days ago

Xz is such a great example of how open source is more resilient, and how much "core open source" project need a foundation supporting them