> The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Free software can be audited for backdoors. Closed can not. Their backdoors will stay there indefinitely.
Access to source code does not translate to "written by some random people". Many F/OSS projects have a tight circle of contributors, sometimes even outright closed as for e.g. SQLite.
That aside, OP was complaining about software written by "random people". Thing is, people working in companies that write proprietary software are equally "random" in that sense. We know that some of them are North Korean agents, for example.
A music CD installing a stealthed persistent kernel-level rootkit on your Windows PC would also be ridiculous, yet that's exactly what Sony BMG's rootkit in 2005 did. And guess how it was found?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#T...
> The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Free software can be audited for backdoors. Closed can not. Their backdoors will stay there indefinitely.