| True. But I like to reinforce my trust with open and verifiable information. Meaning, I would prefer the can of baked beans from a company that is open about where their beans come from and in what conditions. That would be possible today, and is already done to some extend but in early stages. But getting your food from the local farmer, where you can actually visit the farm, it is much more easy to trust that it is good. And regarding software, well - open source, preferably with a open community (or company) around it, where you can at least look through the actual dev logs and git submits to see if they sound solid and if you have the time and skills, jump into it to verify that they do as promised. Then I can have trust. Otherwise the trust would have to be blind. And society has spoiled that for me, for various reasons. |
Please don't try to shoehorn open source principles everywhere in life. It becomes a chore and a burden for a common citizen to verify the hazards of Baked Beans. Citizens offload this to a regulatory agency. You don't have the time to verify a fucking can of baked beans like a million other things in life.
If you buy a measuring tape, do you ask for a NIST certificate? Where does the chain of trust end? Somewhere at the measurement standards in the pyramid of trust. Your personal role in this chain ends at the brand name "STANLEY", because you trust them to make a measuring tape that measures within specified tolerance.
The whole movement around "I don't trust unless the information is freely available" is a pipe dream. It grinds the society to a halt.
I urge you to look around 99% things in life that you just blindly trust. We need better mechanisms for building trust than "Don't trust unless verified". It is applicable in high risk situations, but the society pays a huge price for such an inefficient way to live.