Man we would have been so much better with plaintext communications everywhere, right?
You cite heartbleed as a negative but a) SSL would never have proliferated as it has without openssl and b) the fix was out in under a week and deployed widely even faster.
The alternative, proprietary crypto, would have all the same problems including the current laggards, but likely without everyone understanding what happened and how bad it was. In fact, it probably wouldn't have been patched because some manager would've decided it wasn't worth it vs new features.
I think the point that’s more relevant to the original post is that while the speed with which fixes were rolled out were admirable, the flaw existed for years before anybody noticed it.
Codenomicon, the company who actually named the flaw, didn't find the bug via the source code. They were building a security product and when testing that product against their own servers exposed the flaw. Open Source was not a factor in this discovery.
Google HAD discovered the flaw via the source code, exactly two days earlier.
In this case, the bug was 0.267379679% more discoverable due to being open source versus being closed.
In all seriousness though, I just disagree and I think it's important to note the inaccuracy of thinking that a bug, which is famous only because it was deliberately publicized and deliberately open source, is anything but a huge win compared to what would likely have played out had the most popular SSL library in the world been proprietary and closed.
I don't disagree with this, but your point about automatic audits... It's always a learning curve to prevent silly shit like heartbleed from getting into the system. But the idea that there was no check against this when it was first PR'd seems almost absurd. This is why sticking hard to API and design specs and building testing around them is so important.