Could you expand on what you mean by "I very rarely trust the author"? Isn't using their work a statement of trust?
Source or binary, you are still embracing their description of tasks for an automated machine to perform very rapidly.
If you are wary of what they have done, it's true that source is somewhat more accessible to examine than machine code, but for any non-trivial program source is still quite expensive to evaluate.
I don't necessarily need to trust the author directly. If he provides source, and the source is known to be the true source of the binary I'm using, then the source can be checked by others, even after a problem has been detected.
> Isn't using their work a statement of trust?
Trust isn't absolute. I might trust an author's intentions, but not that his computer has not been compromised, for example.
Being forced to provide source could be argued to keep authors honest, too.
Source or binary, you are still embracing their description of tasks for an automated machine to perform very rapidly.
If you are wary of what they have done, it's true that source is somewhat more accessible to examine than machine code, but for any non-trivial program source is still quite expensive to evaluate.