Why American Corporate Software Can No Longer Be Trusted

jrepin writes "There is a problem with proprietary, closed software, which makes Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the first Pirate Party, a bit uneasy: 'We get a serious democratic deficit when the citizens are not able to inspect if the computers running the country's administrations are actually doing what they claim to be doing, doing all that and something else invisibly on top, doing the wrong thing in the wrong way at the wrong time, or doing nothing at all. ... In the debate around the American Stop Online Piracy Act, American legislators have demonstrated a clear capability and willingness to interfere with the technical operations of American products, when doing so furthers American political interests regardless of the policy situation in the customer’s country."

Comments

Re:The Era of Linux is at hand

[man_of_mr_e]

Incorrect. The term "Free Software" does not refer to YOUR freedom, it refers to the Softwares Freedom. You are not free to do what you want with it, there are rules and requirements you must follow.

The GPL forces you to allow sharing by anyone that you share it with. Further, it forces you to give the source code to anyone you share it with (at their request). It also forces you to grant any IP licenses required to legally share the code, forces you to relinquish any cryptographic keys or hardware algorithms that might be needed to guarantee that those you give it to can also share it.. and so on and so on...

In short, the GPL is about forcing people to comply with others desires, if they use anyh GPL'd source code.

Of course, the GPL advocates will say that nobody forces you (yet) to use GPL'd code for anything (though if they had their way, that is what would be the case). It's rather disingenuous though to make that claim when they clearly would like to force everyone to have to use GPL'd code.