[nzlug] Open Source Census

[Craig Box]

>
> The source code is openly available and I am sure it would have been
> vetted by the sponsors of the project at the very least before they put
> their names to the project.  You can read it yourself should you so desire.
> In what way is this different from other open source projects?  At what
> point does a piece of code become a "known" piece of code and therefore safe
> to run?  I am genuinely interested in people's views on this.


I felt much the same way with regard to the sponsors, and trust that I have
reasonable anti-virus protection on my PC so am not hugely concerned when
running software downloaded from reputable looking sites.  My concern was
the package appeared to take forever to install and then even longer to run,
and was much larger than it needed to be.  Had it popped up in a nice window
and informed me of what it was doing, I would have been far less concerned.
As it was I looked around the site a bit because I couldn't even see any
evidence that the submission was done automatically at the end as promised.

Nice idea, poor execution.  If they really want to get easy Windows user
participation it should have been runnable from within a web page (as
ActiveX/Firefox plugin perhaps).  People are actually getting trained not to
download and run files off the Internet at random!

It seems it will be a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy - "100% percent of
submitting participants were running lots of open source software".  They
are the only ones who cared enough to run it.

Craig