45
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by nIi7WJVZwktT4Ze@fost.hu to c/foss@beehaw.org

Let's say, I create a bank with the caveat that all of my banking phone apps and webapps are FOSS (or if they depend on non-free components — banks probably do to communicate with each other —, then just OSS). Am I going to be behind the competition by doing this?

If the most secure crypto algorithms are the ones that are public, can we ensure the security of a bank's apps by publicizing it?

Are they not doing this because they secretly collect a lot of data (on top of your payment history because of the centralized nature of card payments) through these apps?

EDIT: Clarifying question: Is there a technical reason they don't publicize their code or is it just purely corporate greed and nothing else?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] ono@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 year ago

I don't know of anything stopping banks from creating FOSS apps, but since it's not their area of expertise, I think they're more likely to license an app from a provider, and existing providers don't have a compelling incentive to open-source their apps.

If we want FOSS banking apps, I think the first and most important step would be legally requiring banks to provide standard APIs.

[-] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

If we want FOSS banking apps, I think the first and most important step would be legally requiring banks to provide standard APIs.

Germany supposedly has an open standard banking API. I don’t know if it’s legally mandated but in principle its mere existence and acceptance by some banks would theoretically be sufficient to inspire FOSS apps. I vaguely recall that GNU Cash recognizes that standard.. can anyone confirm?

I don’t think I’ve seen any portable FOSS banking apps for any country in the F-Droid official repos. Which suggests that a standard open API may not be sufficient. Or perhaps I have something wrong here.

this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
45 points (100.0% liked)

Free and Open Source Software

17550 readers
73 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