Just finished catching up on some podcasts and thought it might be worth adding some detail to a response to a listener’s question on open source software made by David and Stephen.
Regarding open source software. The key point missed, I feel, is that “open source” doesn’t just allow you access to the source code of the sofware you are using, but allows you – should you wish – to change it without having to seek the prior consent of its author.
The need for consent comes from the fact that the “copyright” to software source code, just as in a book or article or blog post, automatically belongs to its author (or if written as part of their job, their employer). It’s not like a patent, you don’t have to apply for it; it just happens.
“Copyright” is actually a bundle of legal rights that the copyright holder can enforce against any one using the copyright work. Again, just like a book or article or blog post, just because you can read it doesn’t mean that you can copy it or make derivate works. I can’t photocopy a book and sell it, neither can I write a novel based on the characters developed by, say, J K Rowling or Walt Disney. To do either I need to get the copyright holder’s consent, esle they can stop me and even sue for damages.
It has been long established that running an application on a computer requires “copying” it, at least in law. That is the reason that whenever you download a new commercial application you have to consent to its licence. It is the licence that grants you the right to execute the software in return for a fee on your computer; usually subject to a whole raft of restrictions – not to distribute it, not to reverse engineer it and so on.
All that “open source” means is that the copyright holder grants everyone a licence to not just to run the application, but take and use its source code in any way they like. Effectively the authors of open source applications waive their (copy) rights – hence the adage that open source licences are “copyleft” not copyright.
That’s not to say that open source software is entirely unencumbered, its not public domain. As I said, licences considered to be “open source” give users rights rather than restricting what they can do, but there are a wide range of them. Some (e.g. the GNU Public Licence) tie the right to extend the source code to an obligation to publish that additional code under the same licence; some prohibit commercial use; some new licences attempt to restrict usage for purposes the author holds to be “unethical”. The list is long and varied.
Just as the applications available in, say, the mac App Store range in quality and useability from truly superlative to very dodgy, so does open source software. The key difference such proprietary and open source applications and is that, ultimately, if something goes critically wrong with the latter, you have access to the source code and you can fix it (or pay a programmer to do so). That is the main thing separating, say, Pages or Word from LibreOffice or Oracle or SQLServer from Postgres or, indeed, macOS and Windows from Linux. It is the reason why so many critical parts of the Internet – and increasingly enterprise systems in general – now rely on open source. You are not committing your future to the vagaries of any organisation, a point well recognised by those who plain text for long term storage (even if formatted as Markdown or YAML, specifications and imolementations for both of which are open source).
Looking more closely at macOS software, the question was raised as to should I use open source software? The answer, in reality, is you already are: SQLite – an open source embedded database – is near ubiquitous as a storage layer, DEVONThink and Apple’s own Contacts, Calendar and Mail being notable users; Electron – a cross platform development framework – underlies Slack, Obsidian and many other application; Safari’s webkit was derived from an open source web browser originally develooped for Linux. The list goes on. Given macOS’s origins in the Mach kernel — an open source operating system developed by UC Berkley – I am confident in saying that if you look at the stack of any macOS application from user input to hardware at some stage open source software is involved.
Should you be concerned about downloading oopen source applications? No more than proprietary ones I would suggest; There is plenty of malicious proprietary code (hence Gatekeeper and other security features), so I wouldn’t worry about open source applications to a greater or lesser degree than anything else, you just need to do your homework. Fortunately many open-source projects are hosted on Github, which has an excellent, public bug/ issue reporting system. If code is malicious or if has defects that could be maliciuously exploited there is a very reasonable chance that someone will have raised an issue. Check whether issues are being addresses, how often new checkins are being made and whether there is an active community using the software. Faking such provenance is really rather difficult, so if there’s an active community raising and addressing issues in a timely manner, go for it.
Hope this helps to inform the debate.