Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on July 31, 2004 07:41 AM
"All commercial software should be held to that standard, free or proprietary."
I'm certain you meant to say "all commercial software companies, whether their offerings are free or proprietary."
If you start requiring that all software conform to certain specifications, you've just taken away my right as a free individual to make any sort of software I want and use it and license it however I want to (within the boundries applied to hacking and virus-writing and such). This is an important freedom.
I can see a situation where there were a widely endorsed and well-specified standard (or collection of standards) that all critical software would have to conform to for any business to seriously consider it. It would have prestige. But that would be its only power. I would oppose any law that required all or most software to be held to this standard, except in the context of the government's requirements for internally used software. Anything more is an egregarious violation of my freedom of speech.
As an additional note, vendor accountability could be completely solved if customers demanded license terms that included things like being "required to fix it within a certain timeframe." It wouldn't require anything more. While no one is in a position to demand that from Microsoft, I can imagine companies that offered that kind of liability protection for free software--sort of an insurance--as their main service. This is a good model, I think.
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Re:Unix Specification License and the GPL
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on July 31, 2004 07:41 AMI'm certain you meant to say "all commercial software companies, whether their offerings are free or proprietary."
If you start requiring that all software conform to certain specifications, you've just taken away my right as a free individual to make any sort of software I want and use it and license it however I want to (within the boundries applied to hacking and virus-writing and such). This is an important freedom.
I can see a situation where there were a widely endorsed and well-specified standard (or collection of standards) that all critical software would have to conform to for any business to seriously consider it. It would have prestige. But that would be its only power. I would oppose any law that required all or most software to be held to this standard, except in the context of the government's requirements for internally used software. Anything more is an egregarious violation of my freedom of speech.
As an additional note, vendor accountability could be completely solved if customers demanded license terms that included things like being "required to fix it within a certain timeframe." It wouldn't require anything more. While no one is in a position to demand that from Microsoft, I can imagine companies that offered that kind of liability protection for free software--sort of an insurance--as their main service. This is a good model, I think.
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