How Repairs Are Made On Closed Source Software and the Arguments for An Open Source Alternative
Author: Remy
Software developers and programmers are bound by convention and capitalism. Some of the software that they design isn’t free, so the patches and fixes that they provide are distributed in small executables that can’t be read by likeminded technophiles. This is unfortunate for a number of reasons. Firstly, the fact that the clever authors of these programs hide their source code from the public means that independent developers are prevented from providing ad hoc patches of their own. An independent software designer (and there are many out there) may have a glaringly obvious solution to a problem that the proprietors of the software have spent weeks scratching their heads over.
Patches of this kind can either modify or replace the offending binary files and efficiently complete the computer repair. But because the patches are exclusive to the software company that owns the software, the computer repair may come weeks or even months too late. If the process of creating and selling the software was more democratic, enabling other designers from outside the software company to work on computer repair, fixes could come quicker.
Sad Reflection
It’s an indictment on society that a software developer’s code has to be hidden in this way. But open-source code could be more easily stolen and manipulated and re-marketed as a brand new product by an exploitative designer. Bugs and glitches could be exploited too by nasty programmers hell-bent on wreaking havoc among the innocents. The wicked programmer can more easily recognize the security flaws in a piece of open source software and a patch may come too late from a designer with more altruistic motives. You could end up with a Trojan, a worm, a virus, or worse on your computer that neither an open-source nor a proprietary patch can fix. So, hidden code is secure code. The argument that obscurity means security should not be overlooked.
Opinions from Both Sides
Open-source programming advocates argue for free software that can be democratically developed, with the costs of development and any profits that accrue shared among the designers. This would enable computer repair to come from any software engineer who knows his apples from his oranges. Computer consulting, and more specifically software consulting, would be available from any qualified programmer, rather than those computer repair specialists employed exclusively by the software provider. The knowledge required to provide computer support and computer repair would no longer be quite so esoteric. Anyone with the right qualifications could provide computer support of this nature.
Some advocates of open-source development tend to view big corporations and their closed source programming as the epitome of nasty exploitation, greed, money-grabbing capitalism, and, in general, pure evil. The fans of closed-source proprietary software, meanwhile, regard the open-source community as a group of organic-yogurt-eating soy enthusiasts who are afraid to make money and fail to realize that there are people even worse than Microsoft who would be more than happy to bring down the whole Internet and every computer connected to it. So you can see that both communities have some pretty good arguments!
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