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by mtizim 920 days ago
Not a product. It's literally free, free as in free speech, and free as in you're free not to use it.

Building the code yourself for every update is also a solved problem on every system with a feature complete package manager, including Windows. Trust is not so easily solvable, but if you trust nobody, you can choose to look at ads.

1 comments

> Not a product. It's literally free, free as in free speech, and free as in you're free not to use it.

Sorry, I change my question to "how is this a usable free?"

Same as everything you use on your computer... If it's not open source it's already game over. If it is, congratulations feel free to inspect all the code yourself and build from source OR trust the project maintainers and use pre built binaries.

Applies to this program no different than your Linux distro.

Of course there could be other tools that can help verify things such as checksums on reproducible builds.

If none of that is "usable" enough for you, feel free to set up your own tooling and automation

> Same as everything you use on your computer

Thank you. That's my point. There is no point in stating that some open source code is somewhat safer because "it can be audited". No. As you said, it's the same as everything I use on my computer. Unless we can establish a consistent safety level for certain type of projects, we can't claim an arbitrary category of software is somehow better.