Selfhosted

All I do is look into the open issues, the community, docs etc. I don't remember auditing the code.

Depends on how the project and how long they have been around.

I don’t know enough about programming to do it myself so I like to look at what the community says. This is one thing we’re AI could be very helpful no?

I look whether if someone has audited the code or not & even then I simply find Libre stuff trustworthy anyways

Well my husband’s work place does audit the code they deploy but they have a big problem with contractors just downloading random shit and putting it on production systems without following proper review and in violation of policy.

The phrase fucking Deloitte is a daily occurrence.

No, I pretty much only look at the number of contributors (more is better)

Yes, but with an explanation.

You don't necessarily need coding skills to "audit", you can get q sense of the general state of things by simply reading the docs.

The docs are a good starting point to understand if there will be any issues from weird licensing, whether the author cares enough to keep the project going, etc. Also serious, repeated or chronic issues should be noted in the docs if its something the author cares about.

And remember, even if you do have a background in the coding language, the project might not be built in a style you like or agree with.

I'm pretty proficient at bash scripting, and I found the proxmox helper scripts a spaghetti mess of interdependent scripts that were simply a nightmare to follow for any particular install.

I think the overall message is do your best within your abilities.

Full code audit is very time consuming. It's impossible to audit all software someone uses. However if I know nothing about project, I do a short look at the code to understand if it follows best practices or not and make some assumptions about the code quality. The problem is that I can't do this if I'm unfamiliar with the programming language the project is written in, so in most cases I try to avoid such projects.

I don't because I don't have the necessary depth of skill.

But I don't say I "blindly" trust anyone who says they're FOSS. I read reviews, I do what I can to understand who is behind the project. I try to use software (FOSS or otherwise) in a way that minimizes impact to my system as a whole if something goes south. While I can't audit code meaningfully, I can setup unique credentials for everything and use good network management practices and other things to create firebreaks.