Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on July 25, 2003 06:52 PM
The fact is, the only way you can have a democracy is by governments banishing closed-source altogether (for their own procurement. Companies are free to buy whatever they want). It's vital that government should have source code for every application they use, and probably that source code should also be available for public scrutiny (note that something many never mention, is that governments could "just" ask for source code, without mandating it to be Open.)
Now, the 'why' am I saying that. I'll take the extreme example. Imagine your country is a democratic one, which holds regular elections. One day, people think that counting paper bits by hand and adding results by hand, is not an efficient way of implementing democracy in the 21st century. So, the government makes an offer for firms to implement a software voting system. The corporation that gets the deal has some long-term ideas of how to make lots and lots of money: as there is no requirement about the availability of source, all the code is closed and happens to have some backdoors. When a vote happens, the numbers actually go through the company's strategic office first, where they push the balance just those few votes towards their own candidate... and you actually say good bye to democracy, without most people even realising something is going on.
Now for the skeptical, know that the US voting system uses a database program known as... Microsoft Access. Not saying that there is, or ever has been, manipulation, but the thought there could be (or have been) is kind of chilling. And there is only one way to avoid that: public access to sources.
Another thought about fair competition: closed-source certainly is against fair competition. A lot of software is custom-made, especially in government agencies (who else needs jail databases?). If an agency subcontracts a project, as they tend to do, and only gets the binary, that means they are forced to go back to the same company for bug fixing or any enhencement to the application. The word 'gravy train' comes to mind, rather than 'fair competition.'
To translate in another field, it would be equivalent getting a firm to build a building, and then no other firm could ever build or extend or do plumbery or<nobr> <wbr></nobr>... anything, on that building, but the original builders. (I actually think Roblimo wrote an article about that a while ago.)
So I say, closed source is against democracy, against fair competition and therefore anti-American<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:-)
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Actually, it's a democracy problem.
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on July 25, 2003 06:52 PMNow, the 'why' am I saying that. I'll take the extreme example. Imagine your country is a democratic one, which holds regular elections. One day, people think that counting paper bits by hand and adding results by hand, is not an efficient way of implementing democracy in the 21st century. So, the government makes an offer for firms to implement a software voting system. The corporation that gets the deal has some long-term ideas of how to make lots and lots of money: as there is no requirement about the availability of source, all the code is closed and happens to have some backdoors. When a vote happens, the numbers actually go through the company's strategic office first, where they push the balance just those few votes towards their own candidate... and you actually say good bye to democracy, without most people even realising something is going on.
Now for the skeptical, know that the US voting system uses a database program known as... Microsoft Access. Not saying that there is, or ever has been, manipulation, but the thought there could be (or have been) is kind of chilling. And there is only one way to avoid that: public access to sources.
Another thought about fair competition: closed-source certainly is against fair competition. A lot of software is custom-made, especially in government agencies (who else needs jail databases?). If an agency subcontracts a project, as they tend to do, and only gets the binary, that means they are forced to go back to the same company for bug fixing or any enhencement to the application. The word 'gravy train' comes to mind, rather than 'fair competition.'
To translate in another field, it would be equivalent getting a firm to build a building, and then no other firm could ever build or extend or do plumbery or<nobr> <wbr></nobr>... anything, on that building, but the original builders. (I actually think Roblimo wrote an article about that a while ago.)
So I say, closed source is against democracy, against fair competition and therefore anti-American<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:-)
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