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Reading this, I had an epiphany about why open-source software is essential. How do you peak under opaque abstractions? It's just not possible.

Imagine if Kubernetes was closed source & binary distribution only. Understanding abstractions is, I think, why being open source has become table stakes for infrastructure software.

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Right. The Free Software Foundation have written about this, they consider the right to study software to be part of 'Freedom 1'.

* https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

* https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.en.html

To add: the two most popular languages by most popular metrics, JavaScript and Python, are interpreted. There, you don’t have a choice.

Go is different of course. Your insight is very good. Not being able to dig into source code when needed is unimaginable.

> you don’t have a choice

That's not really true, obfuscating JavaScript can be quite effective at making it difficult to study the program's workings. It can't be perfect at this, of course, but neither is conventional ahead-of-time compilation to machine code.

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