No one is suggesting that open source is inherently less secure
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.
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.
I used to agree until I saw corporations starting to fork open source projects to run them internally like the “I made this” meme.
If I spend months or years of my life toiling over a project and license it permissively with MIT or such, they can just swoop in one day and take it for free and be like “thanks, we’re going to make mega bucks off your code and give you nothing” (and yes this does happen https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-aws).
No, screw that! I’m gonna make my stuff AGPL and those guys can damn well pay me for my time of they want to use my stuff or more cynically, do it anyway or go and reimplement it themselves in-house knowing damn well I can’t afford an army of lawyers to actually do anything about it.
Counter counterpoint: Often frontend js code is minified so that it is smaller and more efficient to transfer to the browser. For FOSS projects you should still be able to get access to that code, unminified, from the project git repo. In the same way desktop apps often ship as binary executables but you can still see the code that was compiled to build them if you find the source repo.
It does make things harder to debug for an average user but it makes it faster/more efficient to run for most end users (in the case of the desktop or phone app it makes it possible to run without needing compiler toolchains that mom and pop likely wouldn’t be able to grasp).
The key thing isn’t that what the end user’s computer runs is readable and editable but whether the code used to build that artifact is available easily and what restrictions there are on editing and redistributing that code.
I spent a lot of time setting up firefly-iii, a really neat and feature-rich finance manager. It’s a really great piece of software by a very responsive and friendly dev but after about 6 weeks I still couldn’t get used to it and ended up going back to paying for YNAB.
I swear by memos now though - highly recommended. It’s like having a private twitter stream where you can send thoughts, notes and files that you want to store/refer back to.
Seems like the lawyer thinks that AI models deliberately jumble the Disney logo rather than specific text/artifact/logo generation just being a weakness of these types of models. (He’s wrong, he’s attributing intent to something janky/buggy)