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I wonder about what I should do if I stumble across a bug in a closed-source or proprietary system. I've had experiences where I've written a script and it has happened to provoke some funny behavior in somebody else's system. Do I just publish it somehow? Do I anonymously send it to them? I worry that if I didn't publish information about the bug, then nobody would ever fix it.

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You could check if they have a security.txt[1]. I don’t think it’s terribly common, but I know there are some out there.

[1] https://securitytxt.org/

Ultimately, it's up to your morals and ethics. It seems like there are more and more people who won't do something for the general good, but instead will only do it if there's some sort of reward specifically for them. I don't think it's an open-source vs. closed-source problem - I think it's just people being unwilling or unable to empathize. These people have always existed, but there's more of them and there are more avenues to expose them.

I don't think empathising with a company is expected behaviour for anyone.

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