Remember when open source was all about peace, love, and Linux? When the movement was small but impassioned and fought over GPL versus BSD/Apache, free software versus open source? When seeing Linux or other open source software running in the wild was a big deal, worthy of a blog or Twitter? Some might pine for those good old days, but the world has moved on. Open source has become essential to how all software gets built, which comes with great opportunity and risk.
The opportunity may be obvious, but the risk often isn’t. This isn’t a question of open source being more buggy/whatever than proprietary software. It isn’t, and the process behind open source arguably makes it more likely to be secured faster when errors are discovered. No, this is fundamentally about the risk inherent in the new economics of open source, as Thoughtworks’ Ken Mugrage calls out.
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