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Will Security Task Force Affect OSS Acceptance?

Posted by simoniker on from the your-name's-not-down dept.

An anonymous reader writes "An interesting article published by SD Times: "Application Security Goes National" discusses some of the talking points generated by a federal task force that will make recommendations to the Department of Homeland Security. One of these talking points is to license software developers and make them accountable for security breaches. Licensed developers would get paid more as well. The article also mentions that "Executives" might not wish to work with smaller undiciplined partners and a little further down that "Hobbyists create Web services [and] professionals create them" and that "companies relying on critical infrastructure Web services need confidence". Would OSS have to be writen entirely by licensed developers to be considered secure? . Yahoo Finance has another article on the subject." The SD Times article is current, despite the incorrect date on it.

2 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. Licensing again huh? by DroidBiker · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I suspect we'll have some sort of meaningful licensing scheme someday. It'll probably take a while tho. There will be a lot of pain and probably more than a few witch hunts before it happens.

    One problem (of many) is of course that if you make programmers legally responsible for security failures you also need to give them the authority to say "No! You can't do it that way! I don't care WHAT Marketeering says!"

    Texas has had licensing for a few years. Anyone know how it's worked out?

  2. Trends are fun by DroidBiker · · Score: 5, Interesting
    In the near term if they adopt a licensing scheme the first iteration at least will be something like the programming language Ada.

    The US military brass decided at one point that it would be great if all of their software was written in one language. They forned a comittee to design what they wanted. Ada was created and various military agencies started insisting on its use.

    The problem was that what they designed wasn't flexible enough and over time Ada became less and less important.

    Licensing will go a similiar route. The government will spend millions on a comittee to come up with requirements for a standard software engineer license. Then they'll find out that their licensed folks STILL screw up and eventually it'll become less of a big deal.

    That being said, if software engineering licenses come into existance at the federal level you can bet I'm going to get one.