Thread · 3 tweets · 9 Sept 2020

I certainly agree that it’s helpful, but I worry about considering it even a central requirement. Don’t get me wrong, I love OS & have practiced it a lot. But at the level of complexity we are talking about, I’m not convinced you can have rigorous oversight of the implementation.

Something like WeChat embeds a complete app ecosystem that’s built on HTML or HTML-like tech. That alone verges on being impossible to audit sufficiently thoroughly and regularly (if you think of something like Chromium for instance).

And Chromium is probably a good case in point: being open source doesn’t prevent Google from using it in ways that remove self-sovereignty. I think we can get the right properties with better governance and protocols, and open source as a nice to have, no?