5C5C5C ,

That link doesn't prove whatever you think it's proving.

The open source ecosystem does not rely (exclusively) on project maintainers to ensure security. Security audits are also done by major enterprise-grade distribution providers like Red Hat Enterprise. There are other stakeholders in the community as well who have a vested interest in security, including users in military, government, finance, health care, and academic research, who will periodically audit open source code that they're using.

When those organizations do their audits, they will typically report issues they find through appropriate channels which may include maintainers, distributors, and the MITRE Corporation, depending on the nature of the issue. Then remedial actions will be taken that depend on the details of the situation.

In the worst case scenario if an issue exists in an open source project that has an unresponsive or unhelpful maintainer (which I assume is what you were suggesting by providing that link), then there are several possible courses of action:

  • Distribution providers will roll back the package to an earlier compatible version that doesn't have the vulnerability if possible
  • Someone will fork the project and patch the fix (if the license allows), and distribution providers will switch to the fork
  • In the worst case scenario if neither of the above are possible, distribution providers will purge the vulnerable package from their distributions along with any packages that transitively depend on it (this is almost never necessary except as a short-term measure, and even then is extremely rare)

The point being, the ecosystem is NOT strictly relying on the cooperation of package maintainers to ensure security. It's certainly helpful and makes everything go much smoother for everyone if they do cooperate, but the vulnerability can still be identified and remedied even if they don't cooperate.

As for the original link, I think the correct takeaway from that is: If you have a vested or commercial interest in ensuring that the open source packages you use are secure from day zero, then you should really consider ways to support the open source projects you depend on, either through monetary contributions or through reviews and code contributions.

And if there's something you don't like about that arrangement, then please consider paying for licenses on closed-source software which will provide you with the very reassuring "security by sticking your head in the sand", because absolutely no one outside the corporation has any opportunity to audit the security of the software that you're using.

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