Diebold Threatens to Pull Out of North Carolina

foobaric writes "A North Carolina judge ruled that Diebold may not be protected from criminal prosecution if it fails to disclose the code behind its voting machines as required by law. In response, Diebold has threatened to pull out of North Carolina." From the article: "The dispute centers on the state's requirement that suppliers place in escrow 'all software that is relevant to functionality, setup, configuration, and operation of the voting system,' as well as a list of programmers responsible for creating the software. That's not possible for Diebold's machines, which use Microsoft Windows, Hanna said. The company does not have the right to provide Microsoft's code, he said, adding it would be impossible to provide the names of every programmer who worked on Windows."

Comments

Windows Software

[Nom du Keyboard]

Windows, huh. They just don't want you to see this this code:

{
$sys$Republican;
Democratic;
}

Re:*Who* threatens?

[Cl1mh4224rd]

Something must be very wrong if the supplier is threatening the customer.

They've been attending some RIAA meetings methinks...

Re:Aren't these guys using Windows CE?

[Ironsides]

With Windows CE, "OEM customers worldwide can create and distribute commercial derivatives of the Windows CE 5.0 operating system source code for shipping in commercial devices without notifying Microsoft or sharing their derivative works with the embedded community."

Note that it doesn't say that they can redsitribute the code for WinCE. So even if they are using it, Diebold would need to get a special license from Microsoft to put the WinCE code in Escrow in South Carolina. Also, they would then need to get this list of every programmer who worked on the WinCE code, from Microsoft.