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

RADARS!

[Palal]

They need to do the same with radars!!! People shouldn't have to pay for tickets that are nothing more than racketeering! (Although most tickets are ones that should be paid, sometimes cops are just out to get their bottom line up!). Also, we need a law that makes all government software open-source. For example, I am currently trying to resolve a proprietory issue with RFID cards.