This has nothing to do with security, and everything to do with liability.

You can't really sue an open source project using a proper license, they disclaim any liability or warranty, meaning the buck stops with you.

If you hire a software development firm and pay for them to build software for you, you will have a different license, the software company can just repackage open source software into their own UI and branding, take the money and declare bankruptcy if their customers try to sue them.

The customers are mostly happy, they get to tick the box that they have a support contract for the software and a company is liable if shit hits the fan. The software development company is happy, they get money for doing very little actual work.

The open source project probably doesn't know about the abuse of the license and thus mostly doesn't care.

My org told me “you can’t install open source software”

Everyone uses Firefox

I just want OpenShell

Honestly, a policy of "no free-of-charge software installed on workstations except FOSS" might improve security a bit and probably without doing all that much damage to the day-to-day workings of the company.

For that matter, if my employer instituted a policy of "no software except FOSS", my own particular job probably would be a surprisingly small adjustment. As long as they were willing to do the work to set up infrastructure and/or let us switch to FOSS alternatives that require third-party server providers as necessary. About all I can think of that's installed on my work machine that's proprietary is:

• Zoom
• A paid corporate VPN client
• A random program that I use to authenticate to Kubernetes clusters in use where I work (so I can use Kubectl)
• Chrome
• The Client Management software my company uses (the software they use to remotely administrate the company-provided machines -- force install shit without telling you, spy on you, nag people who have computers that aren't actually used to return them, wipe your computer if you report it stolen, etc)
• And, of course, bios, proprietary firmware blobs, etc

Beyond that, I honestly can't think specifically of anything else proprietary installed on my work machine. My personal computers have far less proprietary software installed than the above list.

Every day I wake up I thank God I'm not an MBA 🙏

Everyday my misnathropy is justified

It's not more secure, it's so they can offload blame and have people to sue if/when something ugly happens. Liability control, essentially.

We had to pay for fucking Docker container licenses at my last job because we needed an escalation to the vendor in case our SMEs couldnt handle things (they could), and so we had a vendor to blame if something out of our control happened. And that happened: we sued Mirantis when shit broke.

Don't forget your new 32 character/symbol/number/nordic rune passwords that will need to be changed every 17 days.

My last boss got rid of the pfSense routers because "open source is not secure". I argued that pfSense has been vetted over and over and over again. Nope. "Everyone can see the source code." That's the fucking point!

TBF, pfSense isn't the fastest routing, but at our small company is was more than sufficient.

There is an entire sub-industry and probably thousands of jobs being propped up by this stupid way of thinking about software. I can't be mad at it because it pays the bills for a few of my friends...

This pisses me off

It's "more secure" because there's a specific company to blame when it goes wrong.

Worked for a company that had a similar policy against free software, but simultaneously encouraged employees to use open-source software to save money. I don't think upper management was talking to the IT department.