just like the law, the code that regulates our behavior and enacts our laws needs to be readable. without readability a society cannot decide and debate if its laws are just. the same holds true for code.
nobody will trust an identity management system - and digital identity is going to be a big topic during obama's tenure - if it is not open source. even microsoft has long understood this. go read kim camerons 7 laws!
one could carry this argument even further and include hardware. the dod already is debating policies in that direction, since they need 100% control over all their assets.
diebold might eventually free the code in their voting maschines. but can we trust them when we don't know if something in their hardware changes certain bits?!
so governments will move to open source software short term and probably towards open hardware in the long run.
and on a side note: sun is pretty cheap right now. I wonder how long it will stay that way - their open source strategy is pretty compelling and covers everything from the desktop to the data-center.
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just like the law, the code that regulates our behavior and enacts our laws needs to be readable. without readability a society cannot decide and debate if its laws are just. the same holds true for code.
nobody will trust an identity management system - and digital identity is going to be a big topic during obama's tenure - if it is not open source. even microsoft has long understood this. go read kim camerons 7 laws!
one could carry this argument even further and include hardware. the dod already is debating policies in that direction, since they need 100% control over all their assets.
diebold might eventually free the code in their voting maschines. but can we trust them when we don't know if something in their hardware changes certain bits?!
so governments will move to open source software short term and probably towards open hardware in the long run.
and on a side note: sun is pretty cheap right now. I wonder how long it will stay that way - their open source strategy is pretty compelling and covers everything from the desktop to the data-center.