On Wed, 2008-06-18 at 17:47 -0700, Michael Harpe wrote: > What I have always been curious about is this: how many of you > actually take advantage of the open source? In other words, how many > of you really take the source code and do something with it? I haven't much. I have hacked around with some closed source binaries years ago. Though, thanks to the closed source nature, there was very little that I could have done with it. And, I have messed around with scripts, which is really not in the same league as tinkering with programs, but not something that I could have done to the same degree with closed binaries. Trying to unravel someone else's thinking, to be able to tinker with code, is a hard thing to do, even given open source code, even given commented source code. But I've certainly read comments from a few people on this list how they'd looked at the source code to answer someone's query about undocumented features, and debugging. And theoretically, it gives a very good opportunity for automated assessment of a program for eliminating common errors (e.g. buffer overflows), and perhaps checking for malicious routines. I'm prepared to put more faith in open source code than closed source code. Not just because someone can check it, but also because it's a measure against being locked out. I *have* suffered the situation where we've written data using closed source programs that only the same application can make use of, and we've lost access to that data. Given an open source program, or open standard, and a need, people do develop ways to be able to read different forms of data. -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r 2.6.25.6-55.fc9.i686 Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
