Comment by anonymars

Comment by anonymars 12 hours ago

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Empirically it doesn't look like there's a meaningful difference, does it?

Not having the source code hasn't stopped people from finding exploits in Windows (or even hardware attacks like Spectre or Meltdown). Having source code didn't protect against Heartbleed or log4j

I'd conclude it comes down to security culture (look how things changed after the Trustworthy Computing initiative, or OpenSSL vs LibreSSL) and "how many people are looking" -- in that sense, maybe "many eyes [do] make bugs shallow" but it doesn't seem like "source code availability" is the deciding factor. Rather, "what are the incentives" -- both on the internal development side and the external attacker side