Programming

17496 readers

38 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe

Ategon

[email protected]

Dumb question: how do I know if an open source project is trustworthy? (lemmy.one)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/programming

38 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Some background: I'm a software developer, and I've never really participated in the open source software community before. (i.e. I don't contribute to open source projects, I don't know anyone who does, and I don't really know anything about the companies who start these projects to begin with, or what their motivations are for being open source.)

I'm currently trying to find software that my team at work can use to solve a particular problem we have. After doing some googling, it looks like this open source product called OpenReplay is a good fit for what we need: https://openreplay.com/

But when I first visited that website, I noticed that the background artwork looks AI generated. This made me feel skeptical of the project, and it makes me wonder: what if it's actually a huge scam and it's actually malware? For example, maybe OpenReplay is actually a copy of a different legitimate product that I'm not aware of. Maybe all of the stars, forks, and discussions on the GitHub page are from fake accounts. When I Google OpenReplay, there aren't a whole lot of results. How do I know if it's trustworthy if I can't find an authoritative source telling me it is?

Maybe I'm just being paranoid. But this is basically the first time in my career where I've tried to vet a new piece of software for my team to use, and I want to make sure I'm doing it right. How do you know when a product like this can be trusted?

EDIT: I don't mean to cast doubt on OpenReplay specifically, I'm just using that as an example because it's the product I'm currently looking into. My question applies to any piece of software that isn't widely known about.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

@Kecessa @grue knowing that the source will be published discourages bad actors from putting crap into the program in the first place.

And if they do it anyway, other people can come along and repackage it without the bad bits, like vscodium.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

That's as long as someone takes the time to check the code, that's my whole point.

There's torrents with malware that are well seeded even though you can see comments from people saying they're infected, people don't care and you over estimate people's capacities if you think the majority understands what they're installing when downloading stuff online, as long as it fills its purpose, they'll never know that they just installed a crypto miner without realizing it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

@Kecessa no you missed my point. You change the behaviour of the producer, not the consumer.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

People are publishing programs anonymously! They don't care about it, there's no consequence to it.

Hell, that's like believing the introduction of a prison system stops all crime. People just try to find better ways to hide.