One of the discussions noted that open source software development was resilient in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, given that contributors worked remotely and asynchronously in the first place. This got me thinking about Automattic, the company behind WordPress. They are remote-first, with staff spread all around the world. Last year, Matt Mullenweg, Automattic’s founder, appeared on the Postlight Podcast where he enthused me with his passion for all things open source:
…WordPress is actually not the most important thing in the world to me, open source is. […] essentially a hack to get competitors to work together and sort of create a shared commons of knowledge and functionality in the case of software, that something getting bigger, it becomes better, where with most proprietary solutions, when something gets bigger, it becomes worse or becomes less lined with its users. Because the owners of WordPress are its users. And […] the sort of survival rate of proprietary software like they’re all evolutionary dead ends, the very long term, that might be 20, 30, 40 years. But it’s all going to move to open source because that’s where all the incentives are. I think even a company like Microsoft, being now one of the largest open contributors, source contributors in the world, is astounding, and something that I think most people wouldn’t have predicted 10 or 20 years ago, but I believe it’s actually inevitable.
Another interview covered the concept of a ‘software bill of materials’, where applications come with a breakdown of the components that they use. Driven by the US Government Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the goal is for organisations that use specific software to quickly identify where they may be exposed to security vulnerabilities in the underlying components. For open source projects that have not published this information, there are some automated tools such as It-Depends that go some way to discovering these dependencies.
There is often an argument that open source software is safer than closed source, proprietary software. The idea is that open source software will have more eyes on it and therefore people will have the ability to discover, report and fix critical security defects. I wonder if there is always a point where a community has built up around a product to make this true, with less popular products being more at risk of vulnerabilities or deliberately rogue code?
Ben Higgins and Ted Driggs from Extrahop appeared on an episode of the Risky Business podcast last year to take the ‘software bill of materials’ idea one step further. They advocate for a ‘bill of behaviours’ where software is supplied with details of what its users can expect, e.g. external and internal network destinations, and a list of ports and how they are used. These behaviours would be published in a format that common security products can understand. I love this idea and hope it gains traction. Driggs gave an update on the podcast in February about how the initiative is going.
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