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Suit Claims Diebold Voting Machines Violate GPL
An anonymous reader writes "Diebold Inc. and its subsidiary, Premier Election Solutions, is using Ghostscript in its electronic election systems even though Diebold and PES 'have not been granted a license to modify, copy, or distribute any of Artifex's copyrighted works,' Artifex claims in court papers filed late last month in US District Court for Northern California. The gs-devel list first brought up the possible GPL violation a year ago."
Many people have said this, but delivering software on a hardware platform is delivering it. This is why we have source code for things like the linux running on Linksys routers. The routers are mean to be as locked up as a voting machine, but because of the GPL they are forced to distribute the source.
This is something I never thought of before today. But how would they (the GPL folks) handle it if the hardware was leased just for election day. I.e., the precincts pay Diebold $LARGE sum to deliver, set up, run, tear down, and take back the machines each election. Then Diebold isn't distributing anything. They're just providing a service. This would be similar to if I modify a GPL webserver that stays on my personal server. I'm never distributing the software, just giving the output to someone (people who browse my site). Here Diebold isn't distributing the software, just giving the tallies of the votes to someone (people who count the votes).
When they sell the machine to the buyer it is distributing the software that the machine runs.
Google Linksys, they were in a similar situation a few years ago. I'd love to see the same outcome this time!
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
The machine itself is closed and locked down, and most likely cannot be opened without a special key from Diebold.
That you can make from pictures foolishly posted online. Does anyone seriously doubt that Diebold machines are, at best, woefully badly made?
To put it another way (true conversation):
Nerd One: I don't get it, it's not hard to design a machine with buttons that counts ballots fairly in a secure manner.
Nerd Two: It's not hard, there's just no market for it.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
The outcome of this may be that we get the source to the voting machines, so we can analyse it for election rigging. Far more useful than running custom Linux builds on Linksys hardware in my opinion.