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Randall Hofland <rhofland at gis.NET> writes: I wonder if these proposed UCITA restrictions on user rights will instead have a dramtically positive effect for Freeware" and the OpenSource movement. This is something that I've wondered about, too. The reasoning is possibly best explained by a parallel: Suppose that in a highway construction project (such as the Big Dig), the prime developer (typically the state) were to order the contractors to use steel beams from a certain supplier. Suppose, furthermore, that that supplier refused to supply any specs for the steel, claiming that that was "proprietary" information. Then, suppose that an overpass ere to collapse because of the poor quality of the steel in the supports. In such a case, the first lawsuit would probably be against the construction firm. But they would simply show the contracts, point out that they were required to use steel whose properties they were not allowed to know. Therefore, they couldn't be held liable for the results. The liability would rest with whoever ordered them to use the materials of unknown quality, and with the suppliers of the steel (who presumably had specs in the order). This isn't hypothetical. There have been many such court cases. Programmers writing software for proprietary computer systems are in exactly this situation. If my code is running on a system whose code I can't see, I can't possibly attest to the quality of my own product, because it can and will fail due to failures in the underlying system that I am not permitted to learn about. We can expect to see exactly this argument in the courts if this sort of liability law goes into practice. The liability will ultimately rest with whoever made the decision to use a computer system with secret internal components whose specs and quality can't be determined by the programmers. Systems built of open code have an obvious advantage here. I've seen a similar argument used by security specialists. One of the standard pieces of advice is that if you are serious about security, there is one rule that is easy to understand: You don't allow ANY software on your systems unless you have ALL the source code (and time to study it). If you accept anything without all the source, you have no idea what may be hidden inside it or what it might be doing to you without your knowledge. "Anyone who uses proprietary binary-only software in a secure environment is simply incompetent." So far, secret "black-box" software has succeeded, because when it fails, there are no legal repercussions against either the vendor or the person who made the purchase decision. In particular, managers can decide to buy Microsoft or IBM because they know that they can't be held accountable for its failures. They can order their workers to use such systems and write software for them, while denying them the information required to build reliable software. But if we have laws that actually provide teeth for software failure, the people who sell the end-user software have an obvious defense. "I can't be held accountable for the failures of a computer system if I was denied access to its code." - Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" on the first line of the message body to discuss-request at blu.org (Subject line is ignored).
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