The Good, The Bad, And The OpenThe Good, The Bad, And The Open

A quote attributed to various sources goes as follows: "Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral." It takes the shape you give to it, but it will always take one shape or another. The same could be said of open source, and ought to be.

I say "ought to", because over the last week I think I fielded something like half a dozen different arguments from about as many different circles as to whether or not open source was Evil or Good. These polarizations seem to break down like so:

Myth #1: The bad guys can see the source code. Therefore, it's all the easier for them to discover and exploit vulnerabilities.

Myth #2: The good guys can see the source code. Therefore, bugs and security issues become transparent.

Both of these myths contain half the truth, and that half is that both good guys and bad guys can see the source code. The implications of that are entirely up to whoever does the eyeballing and in what context.

The problem is, implications like that can't be served up in a single, easy-to-swallow package. People don't like ambiguity. They like to be told: Is this a good thing or a bad thing? If they can't get a simple, direct answer to that one question, they're in limbo.

It would be tempting to say something like "open source is a two-edged sword", but I'm not sure that's entirely accurate, either. So I'll go back to the quote I used to open this article: Open source is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral. It's all in how you apply it.

If you use it to allow your work to be leveraged by others (so that you can in turn leverage their work), to gain the confidence and trust of others that your work is solid, that's a good thing. If you use it as a club to beat others with, as a political instrument instead of a practical one, then you'll be constrained by the limits of that approach.

We have to fight the urge to pigeonhole open source, to think of it as either a panacea that can do no wrong or a creeping malaise / primrose path. Both are wrong -- but they're also both seductive, because once you choose either side you tend to get stuck with it -- and find any number of reasons to justify staying with that POV.

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