Asked whether AI vulnerability-finding tools have changed how governments see open source, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux chief says nobody is retreating to proprietary software, but the norms of responsible disclosure are now an open question.
Oh God.
That's the perception that we've been hearing though as people who just speak to the broader audience. So has there been a shift in how government is seeing open source in light of all of this?
No, it's interesting. Everything old is new again. I'm old enough that I remember when back in the, again, you can go back to the late 90s and the early 2000s when everybody was talking about, well, is open source secure? I'm very concerned about that. If they can read my code, they could just see all my vulnerabilities, right? And I think everybody eventually got comfortable with the fact that the transparency makes you at least as secure as a proprietary system. And if you have a healthy community contributing and inspecting your code, then you're going to get, then you have a higher likelihood of being more secure, right? Everybody's comfortable with that. Mythos and all the other competing models. And by the way, this is not specific to any one model. The models are now good enough where they can discover vulnerabilities, they can start chaining vulnerabilities together. And it has changed the threat model, but I don't think that it is. I've not encountered people who have said, like, oh, well, obviously we need to go back to proprietary software now. I think everybody is, we all gain too much…
Responsible disclosure takes a different turn all of a sudden. Yeah,
that's right. Well, and it's quite what is responsible disclosure. All the pieces are moving on the board right now, right?
So in the public sector, you have, and you have a background there, so you understand some of these things. In some ways, open source has accelerated, and in other ways, open source has stalled. What do you think the biggest institutional barrier to government agencies truly committing to open…