Did you read the source or do you know anyone who has? Do you have statistics on vulnerabilities found?
If not, it is the same, you just trust gorhill more than honey without evidence to back it up. So do I. But it’s important to remember this is just a lie most people are telling themselves, not backed up by anything other than faith.
Trusting strangers isnt a good thing, bur trusting that out of the many users out there, someone would’ve found out malware, is much better trusting one entity’s proprietary code.
But practically, you can’t expect everyone to be auditing code. The average person isn’t that knowledged, myself included. But “Use Open Souce Software” is still a very good advice, even to an average person (like myself) who couldn’t possibly verify the code by themselves.
Firefox itself is also based on trust on its developers, but Firefox is still better than Chrome.
We live in a society, there’s no way to conpletely avoid trust.
We have to trust our food souce isn’t poisoned.
The farmers
the people picking up the crops
or if its meat, the butchers
the druck drivers
the people packing and unpacking
the grocery store workers
I mean, we cant possibly have everyone auditing the entire food supply chain.
That’s why we have government to audit it.
Preferrably a transparent government with many workers in the departments, and also overseen by a democratically elected government, who can pass laws to regulate the process, and the citizen to hold the government accountable. That would be very close to open source. A fully open source system would be having CCTV footage publically available. But even then, not everyone is gonna have the time to check all the cameras, but the point is we just trust that someone out there is gonna be watching it.
In contrast, a close source system is essentially one single corporation doing all the audits, with no transparency, and no government/citizen oversight.
