When in doubt, blame open source

If you've not read my previous post on thought leadership, go do that now, this one builds on it. The thing that really kicked off my thinking on these matters was this article:

Security liability is coming for software: Is your engineering team ready?

The whole article is pretty silly, but the bit about liability and open source is the real treat. There's some sort of special consideration when you use open source apparently, we'll get back to that. Right now there is basically no liability of any sort when you use software. I doubt there will be anytime soon. Liability laws are tricky, but the lawyers I've spoken with have been clear that software isn't currently covered in most instances. The whole article is basically nonsense from that respect. The people they interview set the stage for liability and responsibility then seem to discuss how open source should be treated special in this context.

Nothing is special, open source is no better or worse than closed source software. If you build something why would open source need more responsibility than closed source? It doesn't of course, it's just an easy target to pick on. The real story is we don't know how to deal with this problem. Open source is an easy boogeyman. It's getting picked on because we don't know where else to point the finger.

The real problem is we don't know how to secure our software in an acceptable manner. Trying to talk about liability and responsibility is fine, nobody is going to worry about security until they have to. Using open source as a discussion point in this conversation clouds it though. We now get to shift the conversation from how do we improve security, to blaming something else for our problems. Open source is one of the tools we use to build our software. It might be the most powerful tool we've ever had. Tools are never the problem in a broken system even though they get blamed on a regular basis.

The conversation we must have revolves around incentives. There is no incentive to build secure software. Blaming open source or talking about responsibility are just attempts to skirt the real issue. We have to fix our incentives. Liability could be an incentive, regulation can be an incentive. User demand can be an incentive as well. Today the security quality of software doesn't seem to matter.

I'd like to end this saying we should make an effort to have more honest discussions about security incentives, but I don't think that will happen. As I mention in my previous blog post, our problem is a lack of leadership. Even if we fix security incentives, I don't see things getting much better under current leadership.