[madez]

The source being open puts huge pressure on the developer not to put in backdoors.

Overmore, your claim

> Nobody outside a tiny minority of geeks treats free software as a selling point.

is wrong. Just to give one counterexample, the European Comission is not a bunch of geeks and they strongly prefer free software.

[Karunamon]

We're not talking about backdoors. We're talking about stuff that's exposed up front before the user can even install the program.

The EC is a statistical anomaly. One agency out of how many out there?