[pp.int.general] Why Free Software misses the point

[Alexandre Leray]

Dear Andrew,

On 05/13/2010 02:40 AM, Andrew Norton wrote:
> The problem is that very few pieces of software are one-man-shows,
> unless they're 'free'. And if the company goes, well that means no more
> support, but the product still works, where the 'product' of your magic
> healer is 'healing' which they can't do any more (it's a bad analogy).
>
> When it comes to 'open' projects, Firefox leads the way, it's the poster
> child. The problem is the performance lags behind chrome and opera, it
> has had more exploits and bugs in the last year, than Opera and Internet
> Explorer  (one article I read counted the exploits over a year, and
> found that Firefox had more than opera, IE and Chrome COMBINED), and
> they're not all that good about patching those bugs when they're found -
> last time I checked (because secunia is down) there was still a few
> unpatched exploits for Firefox2, that have been around since before 3.
>
>    
Could you please provide footnotes with links that corroborate your 
statement?
As far as I know Microsoft and corporations in general minimize the 
advertising on discovered bugs, whereas Mozilla policy of transparency, 
as in FLOSS in general, is to make those bugs public.

> Thunderbird, and openOffice are the only such pieces of software (beyond
> mini-apps and codecs and such) that I put on my system. open source is
> just too buggy, badly written in most cases, and bloaty.
>
> People term closed source software as 'security through obscurity', but
> the sad fact is, open/free software is usually security through
> complacence. Taking the accountability out, means the buck stops with
> the user. Unless you're checking the code yourself, in it's entirety,
> it's not secure. It can be buried in plain sight, and since everyone
> assumes someone else will check the code, very few actually do -
> certainly in comparison with the numbers that give being able to look at
> the code as to why they use it.
>    
Do you really think FS coders review the entire software code line by 
line every time a change is made? FLOSS developers have been developing 
for a long time tools to help them reviewing the code: patches, diff, 
bug trackers, revision control including stats and graphs... Plus the 
commits are often only made by authorized persons, or following a chain 
of responsibility.

At this point I'm getting very confused; what are your motivations as a 
Pirate Party affiliate, and in general what are the pirate parties 
trying to achieve? Fighting big corporations, but at the same time 
relying on them to provide us "good software"? I should probably re-read 
some of the pirate parties statements.

Best,

Alexandre Leray