this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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There's a lot of people with the idea that open source can't be secure because people see the source code.
But imagine this. You have 2 locks, one that is completely viewable of the innerworkings, and another that is covered, both have been unbreakable, but could you imagine the balls on the guy that made the clear lock? Imagine feeling so confident that your lock was clearly the best, that you just expose it to any hacker ever and they still can't get in.
Microsoft can barely get things working with their closed source code.
In reality, anything is exploitable and hackable eventually. With the open source community there are so many eyes on it that when someone notices that the program is running 2 seconds slower than it used to, they discover a vulnerability instead of just accepting it and saying "probably MS doing some BS" and dealing with it.
your analogy doesn't quite work here tbh.
It's not a transparent lock, a transparent lock would be easy to pick. It's more of a usual lock, but everyone can see all the blueprints and changes done to them. You can make changes to the blueprints yourself, and if the locksmiths approve of it, the next iteration of the lock will have them included.
Everyone who's in the set of users of OSS software can contribute, therefore the set of people in control of the software that want it to have no backdoors whatsoever is always larger than the set of people who want to let the backdoors in, unlike in closed source, where corporate can singlehandedly decide to include a backdoor on purpose, not to mention, lots of OSS projects have such a large quantities of different people working on them, corpos won't be able to gather so much humanpower under a single project ever.