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Defending Open Source Security
dpilgrim writes "DevX's A. Russell Jones as thrown down the gauntlet, questioning the security of Open Source software. I've picked up the gauntlet and
posted a response over on the O'Reilly Network. As previously
discussed on /. Jones' comments are too controversial to ignore."
Nice article!
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
.. one example of which is This will happen because the open source model, which lets anyone modify source code and sell or distribute the results, virtually guarantees that someone, somewhere, will insert malicious code into the source. Yes as we all know, *anyone* is free to modify the source code, and then sell or distribute it, and we're all such trusting souls. Only this morning I chmod +x'ed and executed a binary (as root) which I had earlier accepted from a kindly stranger. More FUD methinks..
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
The responder's best point is the last; if you trust software from some unknown project or company, who knows what you're getting. But trusting in major players, such as Apache, you can be at least as sure (if not more so) that you're getting good, stable, secure software as anything shipped from Redmond.
Heironymous' Prime Law of Journalism:
Opions are valued in inverse relation to the amount of money paid to produce them.
In this case, the opinion that transparency is bad for security is of so little value that it's difficult to answer it with a serious tone.
After all, Windows is remarkable for its security wrt to something like, OpenBSD, known for its secretive and opaque practices.
lol.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Now that the MS source for NT 4 and Win2k is "out there", even if only in part, we'll have a good chance to see exactly how secure it is over the next several months.
Anyone want to bet that the number of exploited Windows security holes is NOT gonna soar?
I fail to see how his logic works.
Because I can view the source code and change the source code, I can introduce a flaw. Yet it would be far less likely for a for-profit closed source project to be swayed by some sort of ulterior motive to include a flaw, because we have seen exactly how ethical and steadfast corporations are in this modern day and age.
It seems that he doesn't acknowledge that the aspect that makes open source secure is that it's hard to have a unified, systematic, malevolent agenda due to the extensive peer review inherit in the system. People who have different agendas or motives than you will be viewing your changes.
While his hypothesized scenario is certainly possible, I wouldn't go so far as to say it is a bane.
There is no doubt it may help someone to break into your system if he has the source code or your OS and various deamons. Fortunately, when it's open-source, we can hope bugs allowing bad guys to break in may have been spotted by nice guys before and patched.
.... that would really suck. If for instance there was a leak of your source code on the internet, and of course only bad guys would look at it (because others do not give a shit) and thus you would get only the bad part of the opennes ...
The real problem would be if only bad guys had your source code
Yeah, that would suck. That would really suck.
--
Go Debian!!!
Slashdot is feeding the troll. Just because the original article claims to be a balanced warning into OSS, a little research shows all his points to be wrong.
Just another journalist trying to make a story people - move along.
Open Source Is Fertile Ground for Foul Play Average Rating: 1.2/5
The rebuttal "Who's Guarding the Guards? We Are" , also hosted at devx. Average Rating: 4.9/5
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
Let's see.. the most (un)likely way is that someone hacks a host server, mods the code and then updates the MD5 sums. Stupid. All major Open Source software know how to protect their codebases by holding offline checksums and isolated codebases. This is too unrealistic to happen these days, if you actually care about verifying what you just downloaded and are about to compile.
Instead, the security breach will be placed into the open source software from inside, by someone working on the project.
Laughable. Aboslutely ridiculous !! Can this not happen in closed source environments ? A disgruntled employee perhaps ? I'm sure the article writer would say "but there is quality control, peer review.." I suppose that never happens in Open Source.. I mean, how can we actually review the code when it's publicly available. Oh, that's right.. we can. Open Source peer review is brutal at the best of times !
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
So GNU/Linux source has been out for decades. Windows source has never been out except recently. Shall we do an exploits in the wild count? Note the in the wild part. It is a distinction that anti-virus researchers make as their are some pretty nasty computer virusses that have only been spotted in their labs, not on peoples pc's.
Every now and then some idiot is going to stand up and proclaim something really stupid. Instead of gently leading that person to proper care and attention in the form of a straight jacket and handfull of pills people print their ravings.
This guy is one of them. Opensource vs closed source means very little when it comes to security. Big holes can and have been found in both. What matters is how you respond to those holes. Opensource GNU/Linux is pretty fast. Closed source Microsoft is goddamn slow. So? MS is hardly the only closed source company. If someone ever post figures on the commercial unixes or OS's like symbian and shows the same terrible performance as MS then I will be impressed.
So far all the MS exploits prove is that they have some pretty sloppy working methods in redmond. Not that closed source itself is bad. If all closed source projects have the same track record as MS then it will be news. They don't.
HOWEVER, opensource has proven itself. Countless projects use it, linux kernel, gnu toolset, kde and gnome and all the other desktops, tron the os blueprint from japan, apache, mysql and postgress and the berkely databases, bsd even though it is dying and countless others.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I was recently involved in a project where a large Swedish car manufacturer migrated to a corporate wide client platform. The operating system was supplied by a major American software company, packaged by a major American computer manufacturer, reviewed and further packaged by the car manufacturer's mother company and finally tailored for local requirements by one of our teams.
At any one of those stages, a hacked binary could've been introduced into the operating system. To modify a binary, even without access to the source code for said binary, is a trivial task for anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of assembler.
Proprietary code does not, in any way, prevent malicious code from entering the system. One of the points in the original article was that a malicious distribution could be specifically tailored for and marketed to, for instance, a government. My example above shows how a proprietary code operating system can be used in a similar way, and this time without any source code to check against.
First off, Malicious hackers have day jobs.
Lots of times they are professional programmers that like to play "games" on the weekends and in the evening.
MS's source code is like a prostitute. It's gets around and around to whoever has the money to afford it. To say that it never fell into the hands of a "bad man" even thru legitamate means is foolish.
People spend months and months researching and setting up specific attacks. Sometimes the stakes are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars when it comes to corporate espinoge and trade secrets.
Now most hardcore hackers even if they do have access to the source code definately isn't going to advertise it on warez sites and post their findings on slashdot. Their time is worth money/fame/insane pride to them too.
This latest release of the windows source to warez-style groups is definately NOT the first or the last time the source code to your programs is aviable to people you don't trust.
In Open source:
The developers have the source. The crackers have the source. YOU have the source.
In Closed source:
The developers have the source. The crackers have at least partial access to the source. Your screwed.
It may be a subtle difference, but also think about this:
How many discruntled employees piss in their bosses coffee? Or at least spit? Or use stale water(If they are pussies)?
Now how many programmers are entirely "there"?
Do you want your application to be the pissing ground for angry employees? Can you tell?
No of course not, their have been plenty of cases of otherwise perfectly good programs having security holes and backdoors planted in them by programmers.
You think it's going to stop because Bill Gates says it isn't so?
and /., can you stop reporting this, it's basically one huge troll & it only encourages people like him.
btw Mr. Jones, the choice isn't open vs. closed, it's open vs. possibly leaked. yah. nice. please go away.
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
The guy has a trimmed beard ! a trimmed beard!! No open source has ever touched him, or his facial hair would be reaching for the keyboard !
As previously discussed on /. Jones' comments are too controversial to ignore.
On the contrary, this type of comments are the ones you have to ignore. It is simply mindless, fact defying -1 troll.
I mean, when you see after a quick glance that author obviously did the research and ignored all the facts that didn't support his thesis, there's nothing you can tell him that will make him apologise, admit to mistake or sth like this.
When you see additional rhetorical manipulations (e.g. things that are insinuated but not stated straight, guilt by assosiation, or proof by analogy) you already know, that the point of the article was purposeful manipulation.
For some people operating systems, computer vendors, open vs close source, GPL vs BSD are religious matters and you don't want to get into discussing beliefs with religious fanatic.
Robert
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
"Fact" #1 doesn't say anything about the relative security. Linux also continues to get better. It started better and has stayed better. Windows started from crap security and has gotten slightly better.
"Fact" #2 is (a) wrong, and (b) a non-argument. It is wrong because even as root it is not as easy to unintentionally screw things up as it is in Windows, which does so many things automatically without user knowledge so as to not "inconvenience" the user with "unimportant" details. It is certainly not less secure than Windows.
It is a non-argument because it basically says "If you use Linux insecurely, it will be insecure." It's like saying a car with a bunch of anti-theft devices is just as (or more) insecure as one with none because if you leave it running with the keys in it and doors open, someone could steal it.
"Fact" #3 has been tried and refuted many times. It is not secure because it is not as common. There's been a variety of analyses to prove this wrong. The obvious one is that Linux and Unix are used far more than Windows on servers, and yet server attacks are still more common on Windows.
At some point you have to check your "facts" before calling them facts.
Fact #3: Since Apache/linux run 66% of the webservers, you'd think that there would be many more exploits for Apache than for MS's competing product, based on your reasoning.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
I realize I'm preaching to the choir, but here goes:
So far, major Linux distributions such as Debian and others have been able to discover and remedy attacks on their core source-code servers. The distributions point to the fact that they discovered and openly discussed these breaches as evidence that their security measures work. Call me paranoid, but such attacks, however well handled, serve to raise the question of whether other such attacks have been more successful (in other words, undiscovered).
And do closed-source companies that sell server software of any kind advertise when they themselves get breached? He raises the question of other undiscovered attacks, but he forgets to point out that Debian discussed its attack publicly because part of the open source model is "open". This same shit happens to closed source companies, they just don't tell anyone about it. The real question here isn't whether or not Debian was breached in undiscovered fashion. It's whether or not we'd even know if a closed organization was breached, and his question of the purity of the source code is even more pertinent to a closed organization than to an open one. That's what 'open' is all about.
Therefore, security problems for governments begin with knowing which distributions they can trust.
Security problems for governments exist because of negligence, for the most part. More below.
This (hopefully potential) problem isn't limited to open source software, but open source certainly has far fewer inherent barriers than commercial software. The easier it is to access the source code, alter it, and then recompile it for custom uses, the more likely that it will happen--and then you have no security. Any security checks performed on the software before the source is delivered are invalid.
Ok, he needs a lesson in reading comprehension, or he needs to hire a lawyer to interpret the GPL for him. Because as we all know, and love, the GPL requires that the source used to make the binary you have just distributed be made available to the person you gave it to. So let's say I fork RedHat and patch it with backdoors and crap. Then I sell it to, hmm, let's say the FBI, and they go to implement it. Since the FBI is well-known for security procedures (ha!), they decide they want to check the binary I gave them against the source I gave them. (Of course, I gave them the source without the patches) So they ask me what compiler I used, and what build tools I used, flags and so forth. I tell them. They compile the source I gave them and compare it to the binary, and I'm in trouble. I've committed copyright infringement, and we all know from years of FBI warnings what that means exactly. The simple fact is, he's trying to apply security policies that shouldn't be applied in an environment that requires the level of security he describes. What kind of FBI security policy would approve the use of open source without requiring it to be audited? Furthermore, what kind of government organization would purchase mission-critical software from a no-name company? Especially when there are a few reputable large companies available to give it to them.
He ignores the GPL quite blatantly here, and that is the government's insurance that the binary they run will be as secure as they can make it.
Open source software goes through rigorous security testing, but such testing serves only to test known outside threats. The fact that security holes continue to appear should be enough to deter governments from jumping on this bandwagon, but won't be. Worse though, I don't think that security testing can be made robust enough to protect against someone injecting dangerous code into the software from the inside--and inside, for open source, means anyone who cares to join the project or create their own distribution.
MOst of this paragraph is doubly true about closed source companies because they are closed. An open company is subject
Like what I said? You might like my music
It really doesn't matter if its open source or closed source. The weakest part of any system will always be the person attached to the keyboard.
Blaster was a big problem because no one can be bothered to download a patch.
The MS source code was leaked because no one could be bothered to download a patch.
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
To be quite honest I never gave that Dev X's troll any thought. But apparently /. seems to feel that this very poorly written piece of work deserves not one but two front page storys. So be it. (I sure hope to hell that OSDN is not getting any cash from those losers. It would really ruin my day.)
/. artical. They can go toil in obscurity imo and we are ill served by even giving them the time of day.
Bottom line for me is that FUD is FUD is FUD is FUD. There are several ways to combat it and one of them is to just let those that want to FUD away while we continue to build, create, use, and accept that OSS is a good thing for everyone. Those with small minds are scared, good. I don't want those people involved with me and it makes me actually feel good when I see that they have to resort to such lies and FUD to try to defend what they see as "the only way".
I read a comment here the other day about how someone viewed OSS OSes as the ultimate capitalist leveling field. By making not only the hardware but the base software, the OS, open you then allow everyone to create things as they wish and without any strings. They even can make them closed source if they so wish but the hooks, protocals, and standards are open such that you can make the software work correctly, regardless of platform.
As has been sited here many times MS has not even given that freedom to it's programmers with it's lack of API documentation in addition to it's lack of standards (Unless you think that they are alone in being able to set them. Go away then you shrill.) and numerous changes in even their own types of file standards. (Why does MS Word docs have to change so often? Hello, forced upgrades.)
I really could care less about such FUD from some lame ass website that I personally have never visisted or even heard of until reading the inital
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
It's like fighting a war where we simply re-win the same outpost over and over again, and never make progress. Why?
Because the damned fools think that they're making a valid arguement when they're simply spitting out the same FUD over and over. Now, if they were to refute previously made refutations, further arguement can be made.
However, that would require them to be able to find something to refute our arguements with. Esentially, "Your guns are too big, so we'll back down and make this point again later." Urg.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
It's worth supporting things you believe in when the alternative is to let lies and FUD spread uncontested. It's particularly worthwhile for the benefit of those in the slightly wider audience who aren't generally informed about tech matters, and who might otherwise be swayed by rhetoric.
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
in light of what happened this week (NT4 & Win2k's source being leaked (therefore much of XP and longhorn), microsoft cant claim that their source isn't available to 'bad people' anymore. My friend downloaded the source himself a couple of days ago, i didn't have a look because to be honest, i dont care. Microsoft's source being available is far worse for security than linux/BSD etc source being available because microsoft chose "security through obscurity" - OSS OS's dont. Since NO Firewall/Virus scanner can prevent you from holes in services that are supposed to run (MSN Messenger for example [was that leaked?]) there's going to be some bad stuff happening this week to companies running windows. Hopefully, this will give them reason to choose a more secure platform next time they change software, instead of just upgrading to the latest windows.
To make things worse, the one that offers the malicious binaries can easily log from which IP's they where downloaded. Many people will download directly to their server using wget, and then install the binaries.
If people then omit to verify the integrity of the binaries one way or another, this whole scenario becomes quite risky. Not that I think any self-respecting person would follow this course of action, I still feel that some scriptkiddies out there might give this a try.
Therefore, beware!
and illustrated by one quote from the article:
To limit their vulnerability, governments can't afford to give everyone a choice, nor can they afford to provide access to the source code for their software.
This has been the age-old cry of dictators and despots everywhere: "We are restricting the rights and freedoms of the populace for their own good!"
And it has never turned out to be true.
Lets see what 'security systems' are open source.
Locks, keyed and combination, they still work well.
DES, AES, Blowfish, all these algorithms are available, but the security isn't weaker because of it.
Electronic tags that beep at the exit to a store, they still work.
As long as it isn't a broken algorithm, or a password that is being shown, it shouldn't be a problem.
Hey, I just had a great idea!! If I form a company and deliberately write insecure, malicious code with backdoors in it, I could use it to control the governments of the world and become obscenely rich!
Oh, wait... someone else has already done that, and most likely patented the idea. I don't want to get busted for patent infringement, man!
Damn... back to the drawing board.
Organic free-range music... yum!
I feel your pain. What's worse is that none of these so-called writers ever seems to learn from their mistakes and publishes a retraction or a response. It makes you wonder if they really have any interest in journalism at all, or if they're just playing games.
The thing is, the general public hears all these conflicting messages about open source. It doesn't generally matter what the public thinks because the government will probably develop its software policies unilaterally without any public review or input, just as it does with anything that actually matters. The government will of course choose proprietary solutions from Microsoft more often than not, simply because MS is an icon of the capitalist ethos, and people in government generally do not have the political will to do anything that might be construed as "anti-capitalist" (hence, anti-american).
Public ignorance and confusion is a requisite condition for Government to follow its natural pathological course.
Is it possible that these foolish, uninformed, and perhaps even deceptive writers are acting in the interest of MS simply out of their love for profit uber alles? Or are they simply mindless MS fanboys? Or is it possible that they really do believe that their assertions are true, that they're being objective and relaying accurate information? This sort of intellectual laziness is really sad.
-- thinkyhead software and media
This is too conservative.... it was in the 19th century that this became accepted. It's known as "Kerckhoff's Principle." From Wikipedia:
Okay, here's my take on the situation:
It's far easier for a hacker to write a worm if he has access to ALL the source code that powers the internet. He can exploit, say, Linux boxes that run Apache to spread a worm because he found a flaw in the source code.
Yes sure, the flaw will be patched within days, hours or even minutes, but the damage will be done, albeit limited.
A patch is usually made AFTER the exploit is found, not before. You'd have to have an amazing auditing system in place in order to make 100% secure code. In my opinion, writing 100% secure code is impossible.
Microsoft tries to hide behind closed source hoping that by keeping the code closed nobody can easily detect a flaw and exploit it. The major problem with that philosophy is that the damage will be devastating were the code to be leaked...
Open Source = limited damage
Closed Source = ticking timebomb
Yuioup
This will happen because the open source model, which lets anyone modify source code and sell or distribute the results, virtually guarantees that someone, somewhere, will insert malicious code into the source.
The open source model also guarantees someone, somewhere will spot that malicious code and take care of it. There are 2 sides to the equation.
One point that may be made involves the leaking of MS source. Linux source has been open forever. MS's security holes may only be beginning to be uncovered.
The point of the original article was that due to the open, free, and highly available nature of open source code that ANYONE could get it and fuck with it. Yes, it's just as likely that someone with fuck with closed code but that IS NOT THE POINT. The availability of open source code IS.
If someone at Microsoft implants a backdoor into Windows XP and it goes out with the next update, it will be a matter of hours until they find, fire, and more than likely arrest the guy that did it. There are very few people working directly with Windows code than there are people working with Linux/open source code. While the possibility of someone installing a backdoor is still there, the risk associated with doing so in a closed enviroment is much higher because the probability of being caught is much higher.
It is more likely that someone that wanted a way into your system would just, I don't know, hack a trojan into Gaim or something. Or even better, something with a large codebase. Open Office, Mozilla, and so on. All it would take is to package it as an RPM file then tell the core team you're packaging RPM's so they link to your site. Everyone that downloads that version has a nice gaping Goatse-style hole in their browser.
No, it's not likely, but without a doubt the probability of something like this happening with open source software is much higher than it happening with closed source software. As an aside, I'm sick of seeing rebuttal articles that do nothing besides lick the balls of open source ideological diatribe while simultaneously calling the integrity of the original articles author into question. If you're going to use that absolutely inane logic, then nothing that RMS, ESR, or Linus says has one bit of integrity either. In some way, all of them make money from open source software, so why is their integrity not in doubt when they speak of open vs closed software? Don't they have any bias? OF COURSE THEY DO! But of course, they're on 'our' side, so it's okay if they are biased. Whatever.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
Jones says a malicious entity could ship a version of an open-source project with malevolent code in it. Well yes, but the same can be said about closed-source software too. There's been a few recent well-publicized attempts to insert malicious code into open-source projects, but so far nobody's actually managed to get that code shipped to end-users as part of an official release. If Jones is correct, then closed-source should do at least as well. Yet, over the years, I recall several major pieces of software that shipped with back-doors or viruses on the official media. These weren't just third parties distributing bad versions, this was malware on the official versions bought directly from the software maker and still in their shrink-wrap with their seals intact. Microsoft themselves in the not too distant past shipped a fairly obnoxious trojan program to their own developers on their own SDK CDs.
Jones' assertion may be technically correct, but as with all of his assertions a simple check of the track record shows that it's closed-source, not open-source, that has the larger problem by far.
However, there is some confusion in the article about what security means. One aspect of security is authenticity and integrity; another is secrecy. When you check the MD5 checksum on a download, you are checking the integrity of the files even though the contents are publicly available. Having the source code freely available can only help the quality of projects, and does not necessitate compromising code integrity.
(I wrote this yesterday and tried to post it as an article on /., but apparently there are so many more interesting and better written articles posted on the front page here that mine did not meet the qualifications to be posted. Or maybe it is just so off-topic and does not represent any real new ideas or news for nerds, you know, no stuff that matters is expressed in it, so don't read it.)
I am sure that all of you would agree that the free software community has been facing some bad publicity since the entire SCO incident started about a year ago. I am also sure that when the SCO goes away another publicity stunt will be performed by some other corporation or an entity that could potentially cause more trouble. An earlier article on /. reminded us that there are other dangers that could stall the development of free software projects - an illegally distributed application source base can become the next battlefield for the free source community. Whether this source code could be distributed with an intent to contaminate is not the issue, the issue is that it is important to convey the message to the public that this community does not want to contaminate its source code with proprietary software. We know that the Linux kernel for example is maintained by a group of people who would never want to be faced with the problem of proving in the court of law that their creation is really their own code. What about other projects? How many lawsuits are comming towards this community? I do not know that. But I understand that some preventative measures should be taken, some measures that will clearly display that this community wants free software and free software will not be stolen from other source bases.
:)
How can this be ensured and how can it be easily shown in a court of law that this community takes copyright issues seriously? One way that I see is to set up a server that runs the comparator by ESR against any new submission to any open source project against any code released either by mistake on with malice by a closed source vendor.
This will help to identify copyright problems before they arise. Of course to have a proprietary source code base on this server would probably be illegal in itself but it is unnecessary to have the proprietary source code, all that is needed is a set of hash-keys that identify that source code.
How could this work? A copyright protection server (CPS) would have hash-keys supplied by different vendors of software that falls into various categories and the free software projects are also divided into these categories. Let's say there is a free software project that deals with image manipulations. The CPS would run a hash-key generator on the new code submission and then would compare the generated keys with the keys supplied by Adobe or other companies specialized in image manipulations. Of-course the closed source companies would have to run the hash-key generators on their code and supply their keys, and someone has to tell them to do that, but if it is done right then the following would happen:
1. The Free Software community would have better protection from inappropriate code submissions.
2. This can be publicised and shown that the Free Software community takes their work seriously and goes to the great length, much more than any corporations to make sure that their code is Free and free of inappropriate submissions.
3. In a court of law this can be very useful, it shows good faith on the part of the free software community.
4. This would make it easier to also figure out whether the closed source vendors are misusing GPLed software
5. This makes a nice project that can be commercialized (with all the lates IP propaganda and lawsuites.)
6. This hopefully will prevent many possible infringement claims.
Well, this is just a thought, but I think this kind of verification will become part of reality at some point in the future, given more lawsuites.
Any thoughts, comments, suggestions, ideas?
You can't handle the truth.
How many people work at software development companies that sacrifice quality to meet a deadline that sales or marketing proposed to the customer?
How about a company thats taken a new and possibly bad direction because one of the executives or a newly appointed CEO wants to impress shareholders and make money for themselves?
Point being, OSS projects are typically written on a timeline based on one requirement, is the project ready for the release?
It has always been my opinion that publicly traded companies are ruined by their shareholders.
The road between democracy and tyranny is paved with secrecy in the name of security.
Think of proprietary software as a normal home with wooden or brick walls, roof, shades on the windows and locked doors.
Think of Open Source Software as a glass house where everything is transparent and anyone can look inside to see what's going on.
Wouldn't it be easier to see if there is something malicious going on inside a glass house than inside a normal house? Does Jones really think a burgler would try to rob a glass house? I certainly hope not! People with malicious intent prefer to HIDE their actions, whether it's sneaking in a home's back door or distributing an encypted binary with malicious code, because they don't want to be caught.
No sane burgler is going to rob a home where everyone can see what they are doing. Anyone who adds malicious code to an OSS project will get caught just as fast.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
It's not that I trust you or don't trust you. I'm sure that I can trust you a lot more than I need to trust you. If I have to ask why I should trust you then I probably should not trust you. Either way, I don't ask. If I did ask, I no idea of any answer you could give that would cause me to trust you. It's more like I'd trust you because the binaries are there than that I'd trust the binaries because I trust you.
...so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you!
While I agree with your logic, my only question is: What is in it for the proprietary software companies? Why would they produce hashes that protect open source projects, when open source projects could put them out of business?
I would not be expecting them to cooperate with this. This sets up Microsoft to sue, just like SCO, for any kernel after 2.6. The difference is they have the money to sway the opinions of average persons who are not nerds. And they outnumber us 10-1. They may not looking for a knockout punch, they may be looking for a long, dirty slog.
What if they were trying to do this:
Instigate a problem with SCO and Linux, offer a large chunk of change to license some unlimited unix rights, but all they wanted was the unlimited rights, so they couldn't ever be sued. What if they are working on a BSD project that is closed source at the OS level, but runs all the free stuff they won't have to support. They put a XP like desktop on it using their own proprietary APIs, and make updates about as easy as their current windowsupdate program. And you can update in a console as well. What if.
Now, I'm not ready for a tinfoil hat, but I can't help but to wonder. They have more experience with SCO Unix than anyone other than SCO (Xenix anyone?). They have used BSD code before, and still do (ftp.exe). They are the largest software company in the world, extremely profitable and have access to resources we can only dream of. And they are still hungry.
This is why I have my doubts about companies providing hashes to help open source authors.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!