alt Hacker News> Grandma and grandpa aren't reading the source code and certainly not up at a professional level.
This is one of the core misconceptions of the anti "free/libre" formulation of OSS. Most users don't need to read the entire Debian source to know that it is safe to use. You are free to look up who maintains any part of the project and look at the history of changes that have been made. A lot of projects have nice, easy to read notes along with the actual code.
If you are so paranoid that you can't even trust open release notes then why would you trust a closed project at all?
> A lot of projects have nice, easy to read notes along with the actual code
This alone doesn't improve the quality of the source.
> Paranoid
Nothing to do with it. Please be logical. Having millions of people who can't program trust maintainers doesn't make those maintainers do better work.
The whole idea of more eyeballs is an appeal to a vision of crowdsourcing that was a new idea in the early internet. What we found out is that complacency sets in, the notes eventually don't mean anything, and most source code is not read.
This vision of more programmers spending more time reading other people's programs is wholly born from within programmer communities, from programmers talking to other programmers, forgetting that the average user will never program and not because they lack access. It's a romanticized ideal that is only even a plausible idea in a room full of programmers.
Until you focus on how the non-programmer is going to meaningfully improve the review and production of the open technologies, you will never have a scalable or equitable solution.