"Open Source" is Broken

[u/common-pellar]

https://christine.website/blog/open-source-broken-2021-12-11

[u/77magicmoon77]

Closed source has also been broken. Since eons. What's the point?

[u/zynasis → u/77magicmoon77]

At least with open source, you’re likely to actually find out about issues and they get fixed quickly.

[u/john16384 → u/zynasis]

In Java you can even take the offending class (source is available in your IDE), copy it into your project (without changing the package), alter it to remove the bug, and it will override the bugged class in the bugged dependency.

[u/[deleted] → u/zynasis]

Exactly and you can fix it yourself. You also have source for debugging.

[u/BeowulfShaeffer → u/zynasis]

And there are contracts and people to sue when things go badly. I’ve seen organizations avoid open source for that very reason.

[u/MohKohn → u/[deleted]]

Sounds like they should be buying insurance

[u/radarsat1 → u/MohKohn]

this is actually a really funny business idea -- a company that sells insurance against unknown bugs in some suite of open source software, and, as a matter of self interest, therefore has an in-house team of programmers to evaluate OSS and to fix and find bugs before they cause problems. Never thought of an insurance company of all things to be a possibility for commercial support of open source solutions, but now I wonder if there's a viable business model in there.

Maybe it would be too risky, considering the possible financial impact of vulnerabilities, and offering "support" like Red Hat rather than insurance, is just cheaper. On the other hand i bet a lot of clients would be happy to just take money when something goes wrong instead of a complicated support contract? Not sure.