@ashwin@eff the US government isn't leftist enough to go for such an extreme move. also, it wouldn't be feasible to try and enforce "all apps" being open source, there need to be dozens of "but"-s for such a law to be practical.
@ashwin@soop@eff That assumes that a binary that a user installs is built from that source, and that the source is understandable to a layman. Requiring users to be software developers is like requiring car drivers to be educated in thermo-chemistry
Though many people drive cars,, few are engineers & mechanics.
Yet some cars come with the hood locked by the vendor, and only they can service this black box. ( Closed Source Opaqueware ).
If cars came with Open hoods, people could examine, service, and modify the engines. And non-techs could rely on their tech friends to make sure it's all kosher. Trust is delegated.
Open source projects publish source, binaries, and binary checksums. So that's not a problem.
@ashwin@soop@eff Still you are just placing more trust in the open-source project than in closed source software, there is no guarantee for the end user that the binary is trustworthy unless they build it themselves. There is also a trust in any third party dependencies included in the build. The checksum just means «if you download a checksum-computing program you can test that the binary is the same that we built» and is unrelated to the source code or build process used.
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