Trust in Computer Systems and the Cloud

CHAPTER 9Open Source and Trust

We have discussed open source in passing at several points in the book already, but we have yet to conduct a thorough examination of the relevance open source has to trust in general. In this chapter, we will look at what trust relationships underpin open source and what impact those relationships have on how open source can be viewed and incorporated into systems. Before continuing, however, it is worth noting that by open source, we are referring not necessarily solely to open source software but also to other creations to which open source principles can be applied. We will look at how such principles are applied when we consider licences later in this chapter, but suffice it to say that hardware,¹ documentation, and other artefacts may be considered open source and are included in our definition and description unless specifically noted.

Distributed Trust

We briefly looked at distributed trust in Chapter 3, where we defined it as “multiple trust relationships spread across different entities, some or all of which may consist of chains of trust”. But as we move to consider open source and trust, we need to look at distributed trust in some detail. While we have been concentrating on computer-to-computer trust, in order to consider distributed trust, we will go back to looking at human-to-human trust.

The concept of distributing trust across a community is an application of the theory of the wisdom of the crowd, posited by Aristotle,² where ...