alt Hacker NewsI'm not an opponent/critic of closed source software or enemy of it. I pay for quite a few high quality closed source software packages, and I like them as much as the Free Software counterparts which I use every day.
I also understand that we need to eat and have bills to pay, and there are many ways to achieve that, incl. Free or Closed Source software.
What I'm against is weaponization of closed source software beyond reasonable point. To EEE, to deprecate otherwise capable and functional hardware in the market, to limit user freedom or to extort money.
I hope I made my point clear.
Furthermore:
> I've worked at software companies - have you?
I didn't work at a software company per se, yet I develop open source software for the projects we work on, and I know what preparing a codebase for publishing entails. I also worked as a tech-lead of a Linux distribution, and a nation-wide one at that. I know what it entails, trust me.
If we're talking about experience in terms of years, I'm doing this for ~20 years, using Linux for ~25 years, and using computers in a level I understand what programming them entails for ~30 years.
So yeah, I'm not that newbie who have seen some Python and tied themselves to a knot of awe.
> causes a lot of risk,
Don't let's get into FUD territory of "Free Software is insecure", shall we? We see how Windows has been breached yesterday and today, and will see it more for years to come, as with other software.
> and provides absolutely no benefit whatsoever so it is simply irrational to do it.
Hmm, I'll agree to disagree here because 90% of the thing your digital stack is living on is Open Source and Free Software.
I don't have time to flesh out the benefit and irrationality aspect of it, because I mean, it's plainly wrong when it's put that squarely. We can find some nuances maybe, but it's limited to certain scenarios.
by weaponization you mean Win 11 requiring specific hardware etc?
your comment honestly just sounds like you dislike closed-source software.
for most commercial software projects, releasing the source provides no tangible benefit, aside from people like HNers being happy
but if Microsoft would've open sourced their OS, they would've been vulnerable to their OS being diluted into free versions or maybe even OEM-maintained versions
from a business sense, it makes no sense.
and as for security, closed source software is harder to attack (and was a lot harder to attack before LLMs). like, there's still much that we don't know about Windows internals exactly, and even those who do are a very small group of people.
it'd be a lot easier to find vulnerabilities if the source was open.
yes, it doesn't mean it's automatically more secure, in fact it can be less so if people don't have eyes on it, but I'd say the amount of attacks is less and usually done by more sophisticated attackers