45
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
45 points (100.0% liked)
Free and Open Source Software
17550 readers
26 users here now
If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
What incentive would a bank have to release their apps as FOSS?
You probably could create an open source banking app and use it to run a bank on a primarily open source software stack. But banks are not software companies, and they have no reason to engage with the FOSS world. We could think up lots of potential reasons for why a bank might not want to release their apps as FOSS, but the simplest answer is "why would they?"
I'd love to live in a world where free software is the norm, but we're not in that world. So if the bank has no incentive to do it other than the comparatively niche interests of the FOSS community, they just won't do it.
There is also a lot of "security by obscurity" in the corporate/fintech world - "it's open source so everyone can see the code which makes it less secure". The inverse is often true thanks to Linus's Law.
The article you linked seems to suggest that Linus's Law is a mere suggestion, at best.
No one is suggesting that open source is inherently less secure, just that the vulnerabilities are easier to find, and thus easier to get exploited. For a third party reviewer there's a lot of incentive not to report bugs they would find in banking software.
Unfortunately, I've met a number of people who genuinely do believe this! The same demographic who don't know how copy and paste works or take photos of stuff on their monitor instead of print-screening and tend to end up running large corporations even though they're completely out of touch.