this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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I am starting to believe that we shouldn't rely on this type of labor product in the first place. Something as critical as OpenSSH should be (and possibly is) funded by the users and also NOT use third party libs because it's dangerous, as this incidence showed. FOSS is free not as in beer.
Good luck with that.
Commercial and closed source software is no safer, and may even be using the same foss third-party libs under the hood that you're trying to avoid. Just because foss licences generally require you to disclose you're using them, it doesn't mean that's what actually happens.
And even if, by some miracle, they have a unique codebase - how secure is that? Even if an attacker can't reach the source, they can still locate exploits and develop successful attacks against it.
At its core, all software relies upon trust. I don't know the answer to this, and we'll be here again soon enough.
I'm not saying that they should go closed source.
Your part on using foss third-party libs also makes no sense because my theoretical assumption is that they're not used.
Your argument bent my logic for the sake of making it weaker. Please counter my argument without altering it, and I indeed admit it's imperfect. But this particular lineage of comments is not constructive at all.
A side note. Proprietary closed source software totally uses opensource components. They may or may not disclose it, and they have to offer up what they used, however they are often making the disclosure a fine print item. We support a large proprietary software, we see the memos come through about what bug fixes or opensource library has an issue or vulner. The customers can aign up for this also, but I bet 99% of them don't sign up. And if they were polled on if the software if it was open/closed I'm sure they would say closed only