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I discovered a chrome extension Adblock ultimate, it claims to be open source on the aforementioned webpage. I see that the app was updated about a year ago. Also, a GitHub page is also mentioned. When I went there I see that the repository was updated about 2 years ago.

Does it mean that the app is not open source? How can I make sure that the extensions I use are open source and they use the code that they claim to be?

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    GitHub lists commits as of the date that you committed them locally, but other sites typically list dates as of when you commit to that site. According the Mozilla's addon page release history, version 2.31 says 'Source code released under GPLv3' as the only change, and that was in Dec 2017. Most likely there was no actual change in the source code since then, and the 'update' on the browser addons site was only for marketing purposes. Even if you push to GitHub in Dec 2017, the original commit date (e.g. Mar 2016) will still be shown. Commented May 24, 2018 at 11:42
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    "How can I make sure that the extensions I use are open source and they use the code that they claim to be?" - The only way is to download the source code yourself and build it from the source. Possible duplicate: Is there any way to assert that a source code correspond to a compiled code? Commented May 24, 2018 at 11:44
  • Possible duplicate of Is there any way to assert that a source code correspond to a compiled code? Commented Jun 4, 2018 at 9:02

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How can I make sure that the extensions I use are open source and they use the code that they claim to be?

Short answer: you can't.

Long answer: To check if the source code and the binary belong together, reproducible builds (see https://reproducible-builds.org/) would be necessary. Usually, everyone who compiles the source code will get another result.

If you want to make sure that your binary belongs to the source code, however, you can compile it yourself, which is not an easy task though.

Does it mean that the app is not open source?

The Github page contains only one commit (https://github.com/adblockultimate/AdBlockUltimate-chrome/commits/master), so there are two possibilities:

  1. It is Open Source. Then it was a project somebody wrote two years ago, one year ago he/she uploaded it to the Chrome store.
  2. it is not Open Source.

If you want to find it out, you should write a mail to the developer or open an issue on Github.

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To complement other answers: That it is open source doesn't mean that it will be continuously updated, or at all. The owner of the code can also take e.g. version 2.5 and state that from the following version 3.0 forward the code is propietary. Sure, you can take older open source versions, even build on them and create your own fork. This has happened, see e.g. StarOffice, which was opened as OpenOffice and donated to the Apache foundation but a GPLed fork LibreOffice came to be. Eventually the original died off. Or SSH, which was open source and went closed, the last open version giving rise to OpenSSH (probably the most popular SSH version by today).

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