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?

  • Deestan@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 month ago

    If Adobe-or-Whatever has an undisclosed vulnerability, a few hundred people could easily already know about it due to working there. It can be due to bugs, or intentional backdoors required by corporate HQ or government.

    They will leak this information. Either by accident or for financial gain. Those people will re-sell it to other shady people.

    Now you sit on software where an unknown number of third parties can hack your shit. And you don’t know about the vulnerability, what is at risk, how to protect yourself, or who from.

    You can mostly trust corpos to protect against general hackers to some extent, but backdoors by government or from their own needs they will just keep secret.

    Sony’s Rootkit fuckery is probably the biggest example I can give, but there are tons more. Anti-piracy software are historically frequent offenders.