Disagreed, safety and essential infrastructure should definitely be open source. Right now your typical infrastructure project is about as leaky as they come compared to a typical web app. Exposing that stuff to broad daylight will certainly help to harden it.

I wish I had as much faith in the government as you ... then again as a resident of the netherlands I suppose you might have reason to have more faith than I do in the US?

In principle I completely agree that things being in the open should help to harden them, but especially in the US where funding is often used as a bargaining chip and bureaucracy is rampant I get a bit nervous

Then you're essentially ceding the ground to the bad guys.

And how much of that is already using open-source and it's the configuration that's leaky, and not the software itself?

How many poorly maintained/updated/configured Linux hosts are out there? Same for Windows, etc... in the end, the software can be the greatest, but if the host's configuration is poorly setup/managed, what does it matter.

Except how long does it take to fix a vulnerability in government? If an exploit is discovered, consequences are immediate and the patch to fix it might not be.