The Hedera services codebase is officially open source and can be found in the official GitHub repository: https://github.com/hashgraph/hedera-services You can read more about the open sourcing of Hedera services in this blog posting: https://www.hedera.com/blog/all-our-services-are-belong-to-you
The hashgraph platform is available as open source (Apache License 2.0) and has been audited by multiple code audit firms. The audit from FP Complete for the hashgraph consensus platform code, as well as the COQ proof from Carnegie Melon, are made available on the 'Audits and Standards' page: https://hedera.com/audits-and-standards. Open source ensures that the source code is made available for anyone to read, recompile, and verify that it is correct.
The nodes that the Council members run will have no special role in consensus - their influence, like all others, will be weighted only by their stake of hbars.
In addition, the Hedera network is fair because there is no leader or miner given special permissions for determining the consensus timestamp assigned to a transaction. Instead, the consensus timestamps for transactions are calculated via a voting process in which the nodes collectively and democratically establish the consensus. The network is fundamentally fair because no individual can stop a transaction from entering the system, or even delay it very much. If one (or a few) malicious nodes attempt to prevent a given transaction from being delivered to the rest of the nodes, and so be added into consensus, then the random nature