What makes open source so appealing

Mo’nique saw on the local news about a thieving couple who drug their neighbors and start robbing neighbors’ house when they are sleeping. So imagine her fright when her new neighbors offered her a freshly made lasagna as a welcome gift.

That’s indicative of the level of mistrust some developers have over binary executables that many applications ask them to download.

Now, Mo’nique can’t ask her brand new neighbors to reveal their ingredients and recipe. That’d be weird and it’d make their social life so awkward, especially if her neighbors were not a murderous couple.

Unlike Mo’nique, though, many developers today can download the source code from the application’s git repository and conduct an audit to verify that the code is secure.

Look — it is true that you can’t be 100% trustful of the closed-source applications you download — you don’t know how they work or what they do to your computer system.

But, having access to the source code tells developers that the creating company isn’t afraid of a code audit. It increases transparency.

And that’s the power of open source applications!