I believe it’s not necessary to fully verify a piece of software before it can be trusted. We humans are all black boxes, no one can read our minds, but we can trust each other through our reputations. I treat software the same way; as long as software comes from a reputable developer, I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise.

Verified trustworthy is too high a standard to hold to software. Take for example Log4j, an open source logging library used by many enterprise Java apps worldwide, had a huge vulnerability existing in its code base for over 7 years. Even with its widespread use and open sourced code, the exploit was not reported in a timely fashion.

Thus I’m left with reputation as the only practical means of determining trust; imperfect as it may be.