How open source builds distributed trust
This is an edited excerpt from my forthcoming book on Trust in Computing and the Cloud for Wiley and leads on from a previous article I wrote called Trust & choosing open source.
In that article, I asked the question: What are we doing when we say, "I trust open source software"? In reply, I suggested that what we are doing is making a determination that enough of the people who have written and tested it have similar requirements to mine, and that their expertise, combined, is such that the risk to my using the software is acceptable. I also introduced the idea of distributed trust.
The concept of distributing trust across a community is an application of the wisdom of the crowd theory posited by Aristotle, where the assumption is that the opinions of many typically show more wisdom than the opinion of one or a few. While demonstrably false in its simplest form in some situations—the most obvious example being examples of popular support for totalitarian regimes—this principle can provide a very effective mechanism for establishing certain information.
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