Well, you can see the source. If there is something malicious or bad, everyone familiar with that source in the world would be commenting/complaining about it.
A ticket gets opened, it gets fixed.
Yes, the projects (source) are locked down. It’s not like joe blow edits the master copies of the source files. They have a project team, source control, etc.
They just have the source publicly available for the world to see if they care to.
I like Linus’s comments. Lotsa dopes out there in high places, and he doesn’t mince words. Funny.
With windows, M$ keeps a monstrous stack of poo called their architecture with the source only known to M$.
So you’re relying on M$ to keep it secure and of good quality.
IMHO, they’ve got to be coding what amounts to empty loops to soak up CPU with the speed of today’s CPUs.
If they did a great job at keeping their architecture straightforward, extensible and secure, and they did not overcharge, open source would not really be necessary.
If Windows could be had for $29, and M$ was not trying to throw curve balls to developers and “lock them in” to M$, etc., by always implementing things their own weird way, and they kept configurations secure by default instead of insecure by default, and M$ never entered the applications market in a big way, using their brand name to blow away every application software company they could once their products got popular, they would have an OS platform that made sense to build software on.
But since they don’t do these things, a software company knows that M$ will only let them get so big before they crush them with an M$-branded competitive product (that stinks but will sell anyway) or buy them out for not too great of a price.
They got too big, however, with BG wanting to take over the whole software industry, instead of just run a business and leave it go at that, which leads to the trap of revenue increase addiction despite the fact that they’ve long since grew beyond the natural market size for an OS company. Such an addiction naturally motivates towards monopoly as opposed to efficiency and innovation to bring in more revenue. This is why MSFT share price in the last 10 years has gone - nowhere. It’s got nowhere to go.
And M$ has single-handedly held back innovation for all these years since most people are stuck with whatever Redmond comes up with.
Someday maybe we can get beyond the goofiness that OSs and the internet are today. Thanks to the idiocy of government, I’m in no hurry.
A ticket gets opened, it gets fixed.
If a ticket gets opened, it gets fixed. Or if a hacker finds it first, by reading the code, and exploits it without reporting it, as happened on Android recently.
And the apps go thru no review process at all. There are pluses and minuses to both models. And there is more than on closed source operating system out there. You just have to weight the risks and rewards and make the decision appropriate for you.