alt Hacker NewsHuh - anyone recall other examples of open sourcing a product code base to mitigate a user trust issue? (In 2026 it's perhaps less powerful because "you're just going to feed it to some AI tool anyway" but I think it's an interesting attempt to make and I don't think I've seen it before...)
Replies
jchw • yesterday at 9:21 PM
I feel like it has happened, but I certainly can't remember a specific time. It feels in a similar vein to the NSA releasing Ghidra to the public as open source software after the Snowden leaks.
I mean, on the contrary, imagine if the NSA released Ghidra as closed source software. In a sense they really did have to open source it to mitigate a serious user trust issue.
➕ show 1 reply
> it's an interesting attempt
I didn’t take it in a very positive way, myself. I don’t know if I got my money’s worth before I have seen the deliverable.
At least the quota reset is immediately visible, so I took that part seriously.