Captain Beyond

Framing this as a problem specific to open source implies that proprietary applications are inherently more trustworthy. Regardless, the reason to use free software is so you can have the four freedoms, not necessarily because it is easier to audit.

This is strikingly similar to an account on reddit that has been posting variations of some LLM-generated screed about the supposed problem of trust in open source. I wonder what the end goal of this is.

It’s a cultural thing mainly. Things like rust and npm came out of the “Github generation” of open source developers which trend towards permissive licensing, in part thanks to Github’s own anti-copyleft bias. Github’s founder openly advocated to “open source almost everything” (the “almost” part being “core business value”), arguing that open source serves as a foundation upon which to build proprietary products. In this world, participating in open source is merely a way to gain PR and volunteer labor for the proprietary product.

I’m not automatically opposed to permissive licensing (nor is FSF/GNU, in fact!) but in making it the norm we put proprietary software companies in control of what ultimately becomes available in the commons.