The Necessity of Open Source Why should you trust someone to provide you with secure software and services when this person (or company) is not willing to explain to you how it works? Despite there being no reason for trust in this case, a lot of people use software for intimate purposes without being able to know if it is secure, maybe not even being aware of the fact that the security of the operating system affects every other program which is run in its environment. In cryptography, there is a strong principle, established in the 19th century by Auguste Kerckhoff, and hence named after him, which demands that "[the encryption method] must not be required to be secret, and it must be able to fall into the hands of the enemy without inconvenience;". While this principle is taken even further by most scientific and (of course) open source communities – publishing their methods and inner-workings upfront, so potential weaknesses can be pointed out and fixed before distribution – most distributors of proprietary software rely on obfuscation to hide the weaknesses of their software. As such they are often known to address newly discovered vulnerabilities in a non-transparent way – leaving many trusting users at risk of exploitation. While of course Open Source Software is just as secure as you make it (and there is a lot of OSS written by beginners still learning to do so), there are many good examples for well written, excellently managed software, which has such a large (and concerned) user base, that even tiny mistakes are quickly found and dealt with.