View Single Post
Posts: 915 | Thanked: 3,209 times | Joined on Jan 2011 @ Germany
#10
Originally Posted by pichlo View Post
My point is that there is no guarantee that the code is doing what it says, regardless of whether anyone "independent from MS" has access to it or not.
Thanks for giving most of the answers to your questions yourself!

The code is always doing exactly what it says. That's the beauty of formal languages. The only questions are, whether you know what it says (have read the code) and actually understand what it says.
If you can't do that yourself for whatever reason, you can outsource that task to someone YOU trust. And if at some point you change your mind about the reviewer's trustworthyness, you can just task someone else with it.
That's what makes open source more trustworthy than closed source, even if you're not capable of reviewing the code yourself. YOU are the one who decides who can be trusted.

Of course, someone (trustworthy) still has to actually do that task of reviewing the code. But with OS you at least have the chance that it's actually done.
With CS you never get that chance, because even in the unlikely case that there's an external source code review happening, there's always the question lingering, under which restrictions the rewiewers got access to the code while you didn't.
So even if these reviewers come to the conclusion, that the code is clean, you can't trust that conclusion, because you have no way of verifying it independently.


Originally Posted by Halftux View Post
With a good router+software you could see the difference or spotting something weird.
That's assuming, the software is doing something weird while you're looking and you can actually distinguish the weird signal from random noise.
 

The Following 8 Users Say Thank You to sulu For This Useful Post: