Specific case where it hasn't worked well
on
Source Code Escrow
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
In the specific case of General Medical Practice (Family Practice) software in the UK code escrow has been common for many years.
It doesn't work well.
The main type of disaster (from the perspective of the user) is that the company forgets about business - concentrates on raising their share price or getting bought rather than on their product and customers - and is then bought.
This does not trigger the excrow.
THe companies that effectively fail are also bought, for not very much, and invariably by a company which has its own product in the area of work and wishes to recoup the cost of buying these new (and disgruntled) customers by selling them that product.
So the escrow doesn't trigger, the code is kept secret, support goes away, and the business and healthcare implications of a forced change of software and file formats are not avoided.
Open Source software and the development model that comes with it offer an alternative, and I would say are a necessary although not of themselves sufficient condition for stable satisfactory medical record software to be provided for periods approaching the duration of patients, doctors, Practice, hospitals (100, 30, 200, 300 years)
In the US there is the interesting and FOIA public domained VistA software for hsopitals, with the WorldVista not-for-profit interested in assisting anyone else to roll it out.
The UK NHS is currently in the process of procuring a large-scale computerisation of hospitals and data-spine to soak everyone's medical records into, and I suspect various aspects of previous efforts will repeat themselves. I place no reliance in escrow in avoiding trouble with this. Nor do I think FLOSS is a panacea, but I am convinced our chances would be better.
And the other novel, an interesting one, is "Beyond This Horizon".
We of course are the "Control Naturals". (And President Bush wishes to ensure Americans stay that way)
The UK law is less significant than might be thought, since in the absence of a national - UK - law, the EU law applies unmodified from its effective date.
Not passing a law was not a useful option.
I think the parent here is unduly pessimistic, in that it isn't so much giving a reward that causes people to follow a course of action agreed in society, but their own agreement that it is proper.
In this case that agreement is largely absent, and a coercive law is going to get little effort or enthusiasm in following or enforcement.
There is a remedy to it, and that is to seek the rights to move the information of music around media and formats when one buys it.
This is perhaps a bit Monty Pythonesque for a record shop, where the assistant may not be in a position to alter the terms of the contract under which one CD is sold, but if people have the good sense, or act he same way through a sense of irritation, not to buy material under an unfavourable contract, then the sellers will get the message.
SInce we have this little trade war goingon over the US steel import tarrif, we might as well apply punitive import duties to Windows - in fact make it fair, apply it to operating systems - as to American underwear.
The targets are carefully chosen to affect (sorry guys) States that supported Mr Bush for President - so how did Washington State vote?
IBM Global Services just announced that Linux on the desktop is now ready to be supported by IBM worldwide.
This itself may be a reaction or at least expedited by our (UK) Public Accounts Committee (of the House of Commons) giving them and our Office of Government Commerce (OGC) a dig about having said Linux was not yet redy last year when they were carrying out some paid work on implementation of the UK OSS in Government policy- also reported in the The Register.
Making changes to GPL'd software is perfectly legal and reasonable to do.
Distributing the modified result without its source is neither.
If anyone were foolish enough to do so, they would be giving everyone they distributed it to and themselves the problem of duplicating the development of any enhancements to the codebase up to the point they forked it, wherever it affected their additions.
The rational choice is to distribute your changes, it costs you nothing and means that other people's work on the basic system benefits you.
Actually putting strips of different plants in a single field can be a very good idea for reducing vulnerability to particular predators.
I don't know examples[1] of it used for reducing disease propagation by insect vectors but it seems highly likely that this would be a worthwhile tactic. And very green.
[1] IANAF (I am not a farmer)
Around the same time the Open SOurce Healthcare Alliance will meet in Geneva.
We are probably all rather conservative and establishement in comparision with some of the activists above, but the broad movement toward FLOSS is present and growing.
Meeting details at http://67.69.12.117:9191/oshca/2003
Which is interesting given MS' apparent lack of profit from any other division but OS and Office.
As the profit margin and profits fall, the risk of having unlicenced copies of MS software around (which medium sized organisations can easily do without meaning to) rises due to greater efforts at enforcing/wringing out the last drop of profit.
As this happens the risk-reduction produced by moving functions to Open Source programs increases.
I say "libre" from time to time, and speak what I call English.
I agree with the comment about the lack of large aplications for government and local government mentioned but I feel more optimistic about it.
In terms of progression through classes of program, an idea that is through and through the Open Source/FLOSS literature, I'd say that governmental systems come late after the operating systems and backend systems, and after desktops.
I'd also say that a great deal of what a local government does is not greatly different from things other organisations do, and therefore the benefit is there to be had before the main purpose-built systems are tackled.
The Euro which is in our future I hope (I'm in the UK - which is either part of Europe that speaks mainly English, or the original 4 States, to be decided) is another decimal currency and uses cents, although they seem to be written as a singular
1 Euro 25 cent
I suppose back in the times before the disagreement the penny was in use but then would have been the 1d derived from the Roman Denarius. There were 240 of those to the Pound, Librum hence the funny L of and once upon a distant time the value of a pound (about half a kilogram) of Silver.
So penny is "right" and cent is a divergence, but obviously comes from either copying the French who were exporting revolution and their decimal currency - centimes, now given up for Euros with no great anguish that I can see - or as a simple consequence of devising your own decimal currency.
I remember a time a while back, quite a few years, when the exchange rate was $2.40 : 1-00
and thus a cent was worth a penny.
Now the Euro is conveniently close to the dollar.
There are things I would pay a penny for (0.01p) (I thought we have pennies, and the US has cents, but we seem to be swapping the words) that I won't take out a subscription for, and things that I am happy to subscribe to such as The Independent newspaper.
I found Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox articles moderately persuasive, including the suggested interface for feding back to the user the rate at which virtual coppers were leaving the virtual purse.
I remember a broker explaining to me that people won't pay for information, and therefore the busines model for the company being set up was of a walled garden...I thought he was wrong then. You won't have heard of the company, it sank.
By comparison with alternatives, I am not convinced that Open Source's resources are (stringently) limited.
A lot of the resources of companies selling proprietary programs are for less productive purposes than would be expected.
when you don't have mod points with you.
Arrogant, ignorant git. Mod him down please, someone.
And sympathy to those bereaved, those remaining, and those who will join the space programmes wherever they are.
If it is good enough for most people without the expensive professional polish, then I'd suggest the money is poorly spent.
I think that rather than professional programming it is all too often salesmen having a gloss put on something to sell to admindroids who see that as an indication of quality when it is not.
Losing the gloss and concentrating on the innards is an advance.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't work well.
The main type of disaster (from the perspective of the user) is that the company forgets about business - concentrates on raising their share price or getting bought rather than on their product and customers - and is then bought.
This does not trigger the excrow.
THe companies that effectively fail are also bought, for not very much, and invariably by a company which has its own product in the area of work and wishes to recoup the cost of buying these new (and disgruntled) customers by selling them that product.
So the escrow doesn't trigger, the code is kept secret, support goes away, and the business and healthcare implications of a forced change of software and file formats are not avoided.
Open Source software and the development model that comes with it offer an alternative, and I would say are a necessary although not of themselves sufficient condition for stable satisfactory medical record software to be provided for periods approaching the duration of patients, doctors, Practice, hospitals (100, 30, 200, 300 years)
In the US there is the interesting and FOIA public domained VistA software for hsopitals, with the WorldVista not-for-profit interested in assisting anyone else to roll it out.
The UK NHS is currently in the process of procuring a large-scale computerisation of hospitals and data-spine to soak everyone's medical records into, and I suspect various aspects of previous efforts will repeat themselves. I place no reliance in escrow in avoiding trouble with this. Nor do I think FLOSS is a panacea, but I am convinced our chances would be better.
Is Xen going to be a FLOSS VMWare?
And the other novel, an interesting one, is "Beyond This Horizon". We of course are the "Control Naturals". (And President Bush wishes to ensure Americans stay that way)
I take it donations to the US president's campaign from the odder churches have exceeded those from biotech companies thus far.
I find myslef less and less inclined to tolerate advertising on TV since spam on email became so irritating.
I also liken product placement to search-engine placemnt and fooling, and I don't like that.
In the UK we have the BBC, and if the commercial channels disappear, I can live with it.
The UK law is less significant than might be thought, since in the absence of a national - UK - law, the EU law applies unmodified from its effective date.
/. could frame a suitable contract...
Not passing a law was not a useful option.
I think the parent here is unduly pessimistic, in that it isn't so much giving a reward that causes people to follow a course of action agreed in society, but their own agreement that it is proper.
In this case that agreement is largely absent, and a coercive law is going to get little effort or enthusiasm in following or enforcement.
There is a remedy to it, and that is to seek the rights to move the information of music around media and formats when one buys it.
This is perhaps a bit Monty Pythonesque for a record shop, where the assistant may not be in a position to alter the terms of the contract under which one CD is sold, but if people have the good sense, or act he same way through a sense of irritation, not to buy material under an unfavourable contract, then the sellers will get the message.
Perhaps
MS is the larger vendor in an oligopoly then.
Too many public bodies have become oligopsonies though.
SInce we have this little trade war goingon over the US steel import tarrif, we might as well apply punitive import duties to Windows - in fact make it fair, apply it to operating systems - as to American underwear.
The targets are carefully chosen to affect (sorry guys) States that supported Mr Bush for President - so how did Washington State vote?
IBM Global Services just announced that Linux on the desktop is now ready to be supported by IBM worldwide.
This itself may be a reaction or at least expedited by our (UK) Public Accounts Committee (of the House of Commons) giving them and our Office of Government Commerce (OGC) a dig about having said Linux was not yet redy last year when they were carrying out some paid work on implementation of the UK OSS in Government policy- also reported in the The Register.
Making changes to GPL'd software is perfectly legal and reasonable to do.
Distributing the modified result without its source is neither.
If anyone were foolish enough to do so, they would be giving everyone they distributed it to and themselves the problem of duplicating the development of any enhancements to the codebase up to the point they forked it, wherever it affected their additions.
The rational choice is to distribute your changes, it costs you nothing and means that other people's work on the basic system benefits you.
Self-enforcing, by evolutionary pressures.
Actually putting strips of different plants in a single field can be a very good idea for reducing vulnerability to particular predators. I don't know examples[1] of it used for reducing disease propagation by insect vectors but it seems highly likely that this would be a worthwhile tactic. And very green. [1] IANAF (I am not a farmer)
It sounds like a nice proof of concept gadget to try out the control problems on.
Around the same time the Open SOurce Healthcare Alliance will meet in Geneva.
We are probably all rather conservative and establishement in comparision with some of the activists above, but the broad movement toward FLOSS is present and growing.
Meeting details at http://67.69.12.117:9191/oshca/2003
HQ at
http://www.oshca.org/
Which is interesting given MS' apparent lack of profit from any other division but OS and Office.
As the profit margin and profits fall, the risk of having unlicenced copies of MS software around (which medium sized organisations can easily do without meaning to) rises due to greater efforts at enforcing/wringing out the last drop of profit.
As this happens the risk-reduction produced by moving functions to Open Source programs increases.
I say "libre" from time to time, and speak what I call English.
I agree with the comment about the lack of large aplications for government and local government mentioned but I feel more optimistic about it.
In terms of progression through classes of program, an idea that is through and through the Open Source/FLOSS literature, I'd say that governmental systems come late after the operating systems and backend systems, and after desktops.
I'd also say that a great deal of what a local government does is not greatly different from things other organisations do, and therefore the benefit is there to be had before the main purpose-built systems are tackled.
The Euro which is in our future I hope (I'm in the UK - which is either part of Europe that speaks mainly English, or the original 4 States, to be decided) is another decimal currency and uses cents, although they seem to be written as a singular 1 Euro 25 cent I suppose back in the times before the disagreement the penny was in use but then would have been the 1d derived from the Roman Denarius. There were 240 of those to the Pound, Librum hence the funny L of and once upon a distant time the value of a pound (about half a kilogram) of Silver. So penny is "right" and cent is a divergence, but obviously comes from either copying the French who were exporting revolution and their decimal currency - centimes, now given up for Euros with no great anguish that I can see - or as a simple consequence of devising your own decimal currency. I remember a time a while back, quite a few years, when the exchange rate was $2.40 : 1-00 and thus a cent was worth a penny. Now the Euro is conveniently close to the dollar.
There are things I would pay a penny for (0.01p) (I thought we have pennies, and the US has cents, but we seem to be swapping the words) that I won't take out a subscription for, and things that I am happy to subscribe to such as The Independent newspaper. I found Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox articles moderately persuasive, including the suggested interface for feding back to the user the rate at which virtual coppers were leaving the virtual purse. I remember a broker explaining to me that people won't pay for information, and therefore the busines model for the company being set up was of a walled garden...I thought he was wrong then. You won't have heard of the company, it sank.
By comparison with alternatives, I am not convinced that Open Source's resources are (stringently) limited. A lot of the resources of companies selling proprietary programs are for less productive purposes than would be expected.
when you don't have mod points with you. Arrogant, ignorant git. Mod him down please, someone. And sympathy to those bereaved, those remaining, and those who will join the space programmes wherever they are.
Should have squid cache running inside their network, so only one request for a given file should be necessary.
understandable, but better avoided.
Security Through Obscurity is widely disparaged.
If the code is published, then it is apparent whether faults have been fixed.
If not, then there is a commercial and sales-driven urge to simply say the faults have been fixed, or that there are none.
"You would think that voting machines you would want simple and private code with high encription."
So no, you wouldn't, and any encryption you do see used should also have algorithm and source code exposed to view.
Is I think slightly greater than the harmonisation of State laws in the US.
I like nothing about either side of this mess.
If it is good enough for most people without the expensive professional polish, then I'd suggest the money is poorly spent.
I think that rather than professional programming it is all too often salesmen having a gloss put on something to sell to admindroids who see that as an indication of quality when it is not.
Losing the gloss and concentrating on the innards is an advance.