Re: Just remember @Stuart Longland
Indeed … my point is your trust has to start with someone.
If you have the technical know-how, then off you go, build your own computer with discrete transistors hand-made from lumps of germanium … see you in a few decades.
That's not practical for 99.9% of us. For me, it's impractical for me to run purely from source, I needed some binaries to get started. I did this 3 years ago -- at the time I had just upgraded my hardware and was still on a 512kbps Internet connection, it was faster for me to compile a Gentoo stage 3 image than to download a stage 3 tarball (let alone a full ISO for Ubuntu).
Others, this might be a bit much for them, so they might go with a vendor like Red Hat, Canonical, Microsoft, etc … to provide a precompiled OS.
As for services … I host myself, others might ask someone else to host things for them. This someone else might be someone they personally know, or it might be a company, such as Google, Microsoft or whoever.
The fellow whom triggered this article, seems to be suggesting we abandon Microsoft altogether and use all open-source stuff. While I agree to a point: I think there are bigger concerns than just the availability of source code, it doesn't make you immune to the sorts of problems he appears to be trying to escape from.