system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How can open source software be considered "more secure" if everyone has access to the source? wouldn't that make it inherently LESS secure?
gpt
You can find security holes without access to the source code, but you can't *fix* security holes without access to the source code.

And more generally, a security hole is a mistake or an oversight, and generally the more people you have reading something, the more likely it is that someone is going to spot the problem. With just a few people reading the code, like you have in a company, it's easier for mistakes to slip through, but a large open source project might have hundreds and hundreds of people reading the code, so one of them is bound to spot the problem.

Edit: Note that the recent OpenSSL news is a good example of this. We didn't find out about it because hackers got in and destroyed everything, we found out because security researchers were looking at the freely available source code and spotted the problem.