Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Wait... why does Linux-libre (and #Freedo) exist? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Is Linux not free software itself? I thought propietary stuff was added downstream.

Am I getting something wrong?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Well, to run with your analogy, I prefer things to be recyclable then to just throw them away.

I agree with you - to a point. The linux kernel is too big and complex to understand all of it as a single person. However, its critical software. Meaning, we are not depending on some nerd to find a bug anymore. There are companies that look through critical code to check for security issues.

Now imagine I made some somewhat popular open source server software that saved passwords in plaintext. Chances are good, that by sometime next week ill have someone on the internet scream at me for that. With proprietary software, no one is coming.

(Maybe at the next code review, someone will say something, but proprietary software does not imply me working at a corporation, and corporation does not imply the software having to be closed source)

Open source does not guarantee 100% secure software, but it does make obvious lapses in judgement much less likely. And sometimes, there IS a nerd who will look through the code because they wanted a feature, and finds a critical bug. Like the person that found the xz backdoor. The chance for that happening with closed source is zero.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

I agree because it is exactly what my claim is. It would still be foolish to say that open source software is by design more secure than proprietary. I know that this is not what you said and you most likely also don't mean that, but there are enough people who think that way because they read everywhere that OSS=secure software.

Your example with xz however does not really hold imo. The xz bug was not found because xz is open source but because someone realized, that their ssh session build up took longer than usual and they then used valgrind to check for issues and not because they looked in the source code. It wasn't even really an easy to spot backdoor because it was a malicious compressed file that changed the build process while running the tests and injecting the actual backdoor in the compiled file. Therfore this would have been found with proprietary software with the same likelyhood.

And regarding my analogy: I also like it more when things are recyclable, that is also why I like open source software more and have more trust in it. But now that I think about it, that wasn't the best analogy I could've chosen but it was the first thing that came to my mind.