Hi all, There seems to be a noise going down at the everestcensored blog. I wanted to share what I wrote :)
--------------- "What a load of crap!!..from a cheapo!! you want everything to be Open Source and probably Free.. you FOSS maniac.. Softwares should never be Open Source as it beats the purpose.. because they will never be documented in a " This statement is coming from whom ? Bill Gates? This kind of statement are everyday remarks I see on Slashdot, digg etc... I find this to be a fallacy because it explicitly tries to compare FOSS to proprietary software and prove (without references and historical data) that proprietary is the way to go. But let me walk you through some of the key points about foss software. :-) First of all, if a programmer doesn't want to look at the source code, he/she ISN'T a programmer! Maybe they should altogether change their job to maybe Chef or something. Rather than being a SOFTWARE DEVELOPER. In open source world, code itself speaks as a documentation. This is Bazaar style of development. This is what makes FOSS Programmer better than ANY propreitary programmer (this is a gross generalisation let me remind you) "specialized manner and most of the people who customize don't follow coding standards." Oh, you are now talking about coding standards ? haha.. Coding standards should be OPEN and PUBLISHED. What coding standards are you talking about? ISO? NIST? or that university level coding standards called "XP/Incremental development" or is it "Unified process"? If a coding standard is local to a company, you can't expect that same level of standard amongst international open source developers. It'll by far be more sophisticated and well developed in the case of Open source software development. Beat me to it! "Firstly, it is not possible to understand design pattern and architectural style from codes. Codes are implementation of Design. " YES, you can understand design patterns et. al from codes. That is what REVERSE ENGINEERING is. Everyday, open source programmers have proven this! Open source programmers DO NOT, yes! DO NOT have access to source codes of proprietary systems (drivers, some binary blobs and compatibility layers like nvidia's display driver), yet they do REVERSE ENGINEERING solely based on blackbox, input-output bound executions using OPEN SOURCE Tools and methodology. If you care to look at the myriad of tools available to them, you'll know about it but no one can come to you and stuff it in your brain for you. [search terms, hexdump, pax, valgrind, strace, ptrace, gdb] "So when the Design Documents are not understood, its better to leave the development to the big boys.." Who are the big boys ? The propreitary system developers ? hahah.. These I find are baseless arguments based on a very small view of the open source by someone [it seems] who is not even .01% sure what open philosophy is. "Secondly, the only mechanism for hackers to uncover vulnerabilities is to perform black box testing.. if they had the code, think what kind of viruses they would be able to create?? There was a project some time back to create " Getting access to source code DOES NOT CREATE VIRUS! Getting access to source code instead provides more careful observations by thousand and thousands of people who test that software. In effect, that software becomes better in terms of stability. By the stupid argument you've made, if you care to look at the algorithms available for myriad of open source crypto, they are published and available to study and use. Yet, only time shows how strong they have been. There have been numerous bugs filed, patches released and the development just goes towards greater heights with 1000 and 1000s of prying eyes and eager programmers trying to break the system and then share the results. Academics have long followed this way and it'll continue that way even if closed source company disagree. That is how we do in Gnu/Linux world. We get the source, compile it and make it to work for ourselves. If we find some bug, we try to file a bug and if we can, release a patch fix for everyone. "open source anti-virus program.. Some beta testers were able to create test viruses which the anti-virus was never able to detect.. because they knew the working of the AV.. think about it again!!!!" So, whats the point ? There are so many closed source antivirus companies developing software exploits, does that make them criminal? No! They are merely trying to foolproof their antivirus tools. If you look over at clamav project, you'll see that volunteers send in sample of a virus which upon recieving are carefully tested against the latest virus database, they then merge it with the next release of virus db which means beneficial for everyone. Crackers, no matter what will always exist. The whole argument of avoiding cracker is impossible. In other words, software companies who try to prevent crackers are trying to make it harder&longer for crackers to crack it but this is something that depends on their strategy. That has no effect on open source world. Internal workings of a system should be published, that way, an normal users knows how it works. And this is the purpose of USER MANUAL! Foss softwares are not the total solution but it is real solution to specific problems that exist today with proprietary softwares. Hope you get that right before you post "Foss maniacs" the next time without that touch of judgement and hey hope this also leads you to a path of enlightenment. Lastly, if you want to know how it all works, I invite you to join http://groups.google.com/group/foss-nepal ---------------- Cheers. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ FOSS Nepal mailing list foss-nepal@googlegroups.com http://groups.google.com/group/foss-nepal Community website: http://www.fossnepal.org/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
