Florida DUI Law and Open Source

pete314 writes "A Florida court this Friday will hear arguments in a case where the accuracy of a breathalyzer is being scrutinized because the manufacturer refuses to release the source code. A state court ruling last year said that accused drunk drivers are entitled to receive details about the inner workings of the "mystical machine" that determined their guilt, and defense attorneys are now using that ruling to open up the device's source code.Is this part of a larger trend? With software bugs being a fact of life, consumers and organizations could claim that they need to be able to verify an application's source code before they accept that their calculations are accurate. Think credit card transactions, speed detecting radar guns, electronic voting machines..." Here is our previous story when this first became an issue in Florida.

Comments

Slippery Slope Guy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, today some drunk is trying to get off the hook by saying that the software cannot be verified because it is not open. But tomorrow the gang bangers that raped your daughter will get off scott free because some library used in the DNA analyzing software is closed source and there's not a damn thing you can do about it!

Because ...

[Agarax]

Not everyone wears a tinfoil hat like you?

Kerry lost the election. Get over it. Have a cookie.

Maybe if you actually got involved and tried to get more of your little hippie friends to vote it might have turned out differently.

Or maybe if the two main political parties put forward canidates other than Mr Stupid and Mr Ignorant (or even the almost canidate Mr Nutjob)we might live in a better country.