“All code paid for by taxpayer dollars should be open source, available for comment, for feedback, for people to build on and for people in other agencies to replicate. It saves everyone money and it is our [taxpayers’] IP,” she said. “This is just good government and should absolutely be the standard that government technologists are held to.”"
Nice sentiment, but bad take. Open-sourcing the software that runs our military equipment would be a fantastic gift to the bad actors of the world.
Security can mean security against hackers, but it can also mean security against revealing classified information. Classified information about weapons systems (e.g. performance characteristics) is inherently embedded into the code running on those systems, and therefore shouldn’t be open sourced.
Any information that shouldn’t be public knowledge such as specs, account credentials, access tokens etc should be in a configurable/dynamic format such as an ENV variable or a config file, that way confidential info isn’t part of the working tree.
This should not be an issue in a properly maintained codebase.
Nice sentiment, but bad take. Open-sourcing the software that runs our military equipment would be a fantastic gift to the bad actors of the world.
Our entire Internet, the backbone of all encryption, all runs on open source software.
It is more secure because people can see and audit the code.
Let me flip what you wrote:
Our military equipment already is vulnerable. We just don’t know how badly because it’s not open source.
Prove it’s secure by releasing the code.
security through obscurity is not security
Security can mean security against hackers, but it can also mean security against revealing classified information. Classified information about weapons systems (e.g. performance characteristics) is inherently embedded into the code running on those systems, and therefore shouldn’t be open sourced.
Source: used to write classified code
then the code maintainers are doing it wrong.
Any information that shouldn’t be public knowledge such as specs, account credentials, access tokens etc should be in a configurable/dynamic format such as an ENV variable or a config file, that way confidential info isn’t part of the working tree.
This should not be an issue in a properly maintained codebase.