GPL software in cars doesn't kill people (2016)
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What's sad is that this article uses exactly the same rhetorical tactics. The failures of Therac-25 had nothing to do with open vs. closed codebases. It had to do with quality control at the level of the engineering team.
> At least one person has already been killed in a crash while using a proprietary software auto-control system.
This is just a silly argument. If there were an adequate sample size of open auto-control systems you could make a case.
> Meanwhile, there has been not a single example yet about use of GPLv3 software that has harmed anyone.
Has there really not been an exploit used on an GPL webserver that hasn't been used to "harm" someone in some way? Not much software has the impact to directly physically harm someone in the same way a car does. But user information and data?
There's so much more wrong with this article that it would take an even longer article to explain it. This is literally the stupidest thing I've read in years.
Yep, I started writing up a rebuttal and realized I'd be here all day.
It's incredibly frustrating to see articles supporting your opinion, but in a fallacious manner that's easy to rebut.
You are taking the sentence without context, making it look like a silly argument. Kuhn was juxtaposing it to unfunded claims that open source is known to be more dangerous than closed source.
Later on the discussion takes a rational approach: "until you can prove that proprietary software assures safety in a way that FLOSS cannot..."