I recently learned that my company prefers closed-source tools for privacy and security.
I don’t know whether the person who said that was just confused, but I am trying to come up with reasons to opt to closed-source for privacy.
In my experience the “privacy and security” argument is a smokescreen.
The real reason is that it makes someone else responsible for zero-days occuring, for the security of the tool, and for fixing security problems in the tool’s code. With open source tools the responsibility shifts to your cybersecurity team to at least audit the code.
I don’t know about your workplace, but there’s no one qualified for that at my workplace.
A good analogy: If you build your house yourself, you’re responsible for it meeting local building codes. If you pay someone else to build it, you can still have the same problems, but it’s the builder’s responsibility.
That smokescreen argument makes a lot of sense. Both the company and our clients, tend to opt for ready out-of-the-box proprietary solutions, instead of taking responsibility of the maintenance.
It doesn’t matter how bad or limiting that proprietary option is. As long as it somewhat fits our scenario and requires less code, it’s fine.
instead of taking responsibility
This is why, they prefer to shift the blame in case it hits the fan. That’s all, that’s it.
They don’t care about code quality, maintainability or whatever.
There is some logic here, having a business relationship with a party that now has a contractual duty to you, is a stronger guarantee than an open source project.
For instance Windows is source available, to many businesses, so in one sense it’s open source, and the other sense is closed source. From a business perspective that’s a reasonable trade-off sometimes
Tin-foil hat on. So, with CCP/GSP, secret agencies are free to find backdoors on the system.
I didn’t know about those programs. I thought the Windows source code is kept secret from everyone.
I recently learned that my company prefers closed-source tools for privacy and security.
I will suggest that same logic to my banker too: a vault whose key they won’t own, but I will. Don’t worry, all your money will be safe with me, it’s a promise 😇
Pinky promise
Cloased source does for privacy and security what sweeping problems under the rug does: it mitigates them, a bit, but then when they inevitably do hit, they hit hard.
Best reason: nobody see how bad your code is 🤷♂️
You can make an argument for confidentiality making it harder to find exploits in your code. If nobody cares enough to report them to you, or if you don’t have the resources to fix them, open-sourcing your code just exposes them.
This is pretty much only an argument if you use stuff that would be irresponsible to use in the first place tho
If nobody cares enough to report them to you, or if you don’t have the resources to fix them
To be fair, this scenario does feel worryingly like it might be common.
