davidong

> I actually was able to do some open source work with Codeplex

Nice, I guess people in your area had done this before and nobody was scared of sharing code. My experience wasn't so good.

I wrote some BizTalk VS-LoadTest extensions while contracting at Microsoft UK and battled for the best part of 3 months to get permission to share them on CodePlex.

While everyone agreed it was good for the company and the products and an all-round good idea to open source the code, nobody would put their neck on the line and give me written permission to do so. So it didn't happen.

I've been thinking about reducing trust in a post-PRISM world a bit today and while switching doesn't help here currently, open source projects are at least theoretically able to prove their trustworthiness by publishing audit tools.

Say for example a distro publishes build scripts which download, verify, patch, compile and package some software using a specific toolchain, anyone could audit this via a simple hash check.

Apple and Microsoft could never prove themselves this way because they need to keep their source code a secret.