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Comment by EMIRELADERO | Hacker News Reader

Still doesn't explain why it's all not at least source-available. I'm not going to complain if they don't use open-source licenses such as MIT or (A)GPL, but straight up not making the source code publicly readable at all is a big strike against it.

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Making it opensource is no guarantee at all(if there could be any), for instance it could be more dangerous: anyone could spot a security hole and take advantage of it without reporting it, there is no guarantee there would be a responsible disclosure.

Are you vouching for security through obscurity?

When systems and code are audited and pentested by third parties, I don't see any benefit of actually making anything public.

There is good insight into this from this comment from them in 2014: https://1password.community/discussion/comment/114870/#Comme...

That seems to be about transitioning to an open-source model. I don't mean that. I mean simply having their git repo publicly accesible in a read-only fashion. No external contributions, no license, etc.

I see no reason not to do this, especially for such a security-oriented service. You should be striving for as much transparency as possible.

Because they like being in business vs just giving away their software?

Where is the repo of software that you've paid an unknown number of developers to work on for multiple years over multiple versions that you charge for and run a viable business employing all of the peoples?

You should perhaps read up on software licenses and what it means when code is public but unlicensed.

Just because source code is available doesn't mean you can legally use it.

That's why every "the company source code got stolen!" news is nothingburger, no competitor can use it, it would be huge liability to be caught using it, and it "only" matters for people that might find bugs in it.

They are in the business of doing business. How much of the codebase that makes up their business model would you like them to expose?

Bitwarden is in the business of doing business, too. But their source code is publicly available. A lot of it is even under GPL:

https://github.com/bitwarden/server/blob/master/LICENSE_FAQ....

Fun fact: Bitwarden also includes some of the 1Password open-source code: https://github.com/bitwarden/clients/blob/c10e93c0d9cf306a59...

I mean, even if their code was publicly available, how could you verify that they are running that code, and not some other code?

Compile it yourself & run the binary?

If you could do that, what value would the business have?

Hosted infrastructure? Support? Publishing signed binaries onto app stores?

Licensing

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