I always see people looking specifically for open source software and never knew why. Thanks!
In: Technology
You can view the code that runs the software online, for free. However this does not inherently mean it is safe. If you wanted to ensure that it was, you would have to comb through the codebase to see if there’s anything malicious that the software is doing (like keyboard tracking in the background, for example). This of course requires a decent amount of ability to code (even people with CS degrees still struggle with grappling an entire codebase that they did not write/contribute to). So it is not likely the average consumer can actually ensure that the software is safe, however, many large projects such as GNU, Linux, and so on have so many contributors that are *excellent* programmers that these software are almost certainly safe.
That being said, Linux was recently discovered to have a back door for the US government to access. So even the largest open source projects that are revered for their open source nature are still vulnerable. In fact, I would argue these larger projects are inherently more unsafe because of their large nature (hundreds of thousands of lines are in the core linux kernel, with millions of lines for drivers), as well as their prominence in industry. It’s just beneficial for the government to have access to companies servers (whether you agree in that or not is arguable, but the US government would say it’s in their best interest, yet still cover it up).
Software that is privately held by corporations are impossible to access the source code of. So it’s a pure unknown whether or not it is safe. With open source, it is at least possible to ensure it is safe, albeit, it is not inherently safe for all of the above reasons.
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