This is a very unfortunate precedent. I do not know anything about Finnish law, so I don't know if there is a way for this law to be overturned by an equivalent of the US Supreme Court, but if this law stays in place this is a very bad precedent indeed.
What defines a computer virus? Is ANY self-replicating code to be considered a virus? If so, a lot of legitimate research into Genetic Programming would be covered by such laws.
If, to be a virus, it is decided that the program must be "malicious" (as is the case with this Finnish law), what defines malice in a computer program? The article states "intent to harm"... These grey area laws are always dangerous (posession with intent to sell in the US is a good example). Also, what if the intent was to harm, but in a controlled setting, such as research or at an Anti-Virus development firm, and the virus got out accidentally?
You're obviously too biased and ignorant to understand, but actually VM based systems are very useful for some real world issues such as system portability (Java runs on lots of stuff, few portability issues except with AWT UI stuff), easier verification of program correctness (pointers screw that right up), possibility of supercompilation (can't do that properly with pointers, either), etc. There is also a development time issue for very large systems, as we did not have to write our own memory management schemes, and the issue of this version of the system having been written primarily by scientists first, not programmers, making Java a good choice for ease of use.
Java compilers (and supercompilers, which would run prior to a compiler, actually) are being developed, and while the compilers may not speed things up much, supercompilers will.
So, if the JVMs don't totally suck, Java is about as good as C++, and only 2-3 times slower than C. With JNI we could rewrite very computationally intensive parts of the program in C, as well. As things like TowerJ and HotSpot are ported to Linux and other platforms, speed-ups occur there, as well.
All in all, if you're working in C++ you can get roughly the same performance from Java... (it will require a lot of tricks to get C level performance... maybe even the Java chip... but so what? most of the system doesn't need it... many systems don't...)
Technological systems that benefit the public are very good, especially when the public can have a say in their operation. There are, of course, potential abuses, but it's up to each individual to decide what they will use a trackable system for. If you don't want the government (or advertising company dataminers) to know how much Pizza you're ordering, walk to the Pizza shop in person and pay cash...
At this time, you still have that option... and we'll only lose such options if people choose to give them up en-masse... There are still alternatives, though they often involve more work (like leaving your home).
The choice is in all our hands: total convenience and no privacy, or forgo some convenience and keep some of the old, inefficient, and difficult-to-monitor systems in place (there can be a balance, you can have some of both)...
Let's see, Iridium has lofted approximately 200 communications satellites (presumably they don't have cameras on them, but I haven't gone up and checked...), and they're just one company. There are thousands of satellites in orbit, and many are in *geosynchronous* orbit (that means they orbit over one place, NY City, for example) because they're expected to be there 24-7 for a specific purpose (usualy comm relays). If private telcom industry can loft hundreds of satellites, the US government or a private security firm can also loft enough satellites to cover the US with 1m resolution imaging cameras.
Now, if you use the "excess" bandwidth of the whole slew of communications satellites in orbit to send the images constantly down to a sufficiently powerful server farm (hey, you could run it on Linux!;-> ) then all you need to do is have the images properly tagged for time and place, and you have a database of continuous, or near-continuous (1-10 second frame delays wouldn't make much difference) video footage of the US (or Europe, or wherever) which is keyed on GPS coordinates and time. All you need to do to find the footage you want is to look it up in the database by its (GPS, time) coordinates...
So if good guy claims he was at the Yankees game while bad guy was shooting someone on the Great Lawn in Central Park, just punch up those two locations and look for your guys (you'll have many thousands of frames to check through, but so what?). Hopefully they're looking up, or you can identify them by the tops of their heads (unless, of course, you're taking your images at the "right" angle for each meter), but other than that... you can find the meter you're looking for rather easily...
This is all bad. This is definate Big Brother stuff, and additionally, even if the imaging is of rather poor quality and your face is difficult to see (and there is certainly feature enhancement software to clear things up if the image is shot at an angle preserves enough information to do so), the Gov't have a way of convincing juries that what they say is a picture of you IS a picture of you, because "pictures don't lie"...
For all their good, powerful computers definately are presenting the possibility of a Panoptical surveliance society. Don't worry if you're a good guy, right? Well, that depends on what "good" is... What if you're a Communist or Pacifist or other "political undesirable" at an anti-government rally? What if you just feel like taking a stroll without it being recorded for posterity? Oughtn't that be your right? Do the security benefits outweigh the privacy infringement in this case? They do not seem to, frankly...
Though a good number of the people who responded to this are obvious flamebaiters, I'll take a minute to follow-up anyway.
1) We're not using Java to gain in performance, obviously, we're trying to optimize performance of a system already written in Java.
2) Solaris x86 JVMs also sucked. In fact, when we made the NT decision, JVMs on Solaris SPARC AND Solaris x86 were slower than on NT. Extensive benchmarking was done, using both our software, and simple benchmark tests.
3) Only one person suggested that maybe Linux does need a better JVM. It's ironic that the response is to attack our software (which you know nothing about), Java, and our intelligence, rather than to suggest that writing a good JVM would be useful... R&D folks are taking a liking to Java, and without a good JVM Linux will be unusable by a fair portion of the R&D community.
4) Actually, one of our people is writing a better JVM, though obviously it will be of little use to any of you...
5) Um, we don't need Beowulf "to run Java", we need a cluster or supercomputer to run the very complicated software we've written in Java.
It's funny, rather than being interested in how to expand the horizons of Linux and maybe try to understand why someone would want to use a VM based language like Java, people just get all uppity. Your computing paradigm is challenged, time to get defensive...
Whatever.
We're doing fine without Linux, actually, I just thought maybe some other Linux folks would be interested in writing a decent JVM, but we'll do it ourselves...
With Linux gaining acceptance for very large scale applications (Weather supercomputer and other applications of Linux clusters to computationally intensive problems, mostly for cost reasons (commodity hardware vs. custom)), it seems that some people think that Linux is up to or can be tuned to be up to the job of handling some of the largest applications around...
Things like IRC and Oracle stability are an issue of applications interacting with the OS, and perhaps these apps need patching and tuning as much as the Linux Kernel does. Many of these issues are issues of people comparing entire systems (including applications, and system admins) without taking into account the system variables (is the application ported? was it tuned for that OS? are the system admins of the two systems being compared of comparable skill?)
Clearly Linux has its weaknesses, but when analyzing it is much more useful to do a straight comparison than the touchy-feely anecdotal kinds of comparisons that people tend to make... and to know what you're comparing. To say "Linux works poorly with IRC server software" is not to say "Linux is bad for all large scale server apps"...
The Dvorak keyboard was invented by August Dvorak of University of Washington, in 1936. This particular Dvorak was a cousin of the composer Antonin Dvorak.
I work at a company that is working on a very complex artificial intelligence architecture, and for a variety of reasons it is written in Java (since the other most popular AI languages use VMs or are directly interpreted, expect the AI community at large to want good interpreters on Linux).
We looked at putting together a Beowulf Linux cluster to run our software, which is very memory and processor intensive, but Linux could not do the job because JVMs on Linux are absolutely terrible. We wound up on WinNT (we couldn't afford Suns, but plan to upgrade when we can) because the JVMs were the best.
Because people making large software systems are fed up with reengineering for new hardware, expect other people to start choosing Java for large, intensive applications that were previously written in C, Fortran, C++, etc. If Linux can't compete with other OSes for running large Java programs, these projects will not be able to consider Linux as their OS of choice (which we all WANTED to do here, we were very upset to go to NT).
Right now the fastest Java environment we've found is Java 2 with HotSpot, running on NT (we're testing Solaris now, as we might be able to afford Suns soon). Can the Linux community do any better, or even as well? So far, no.
Well, that is an interesting notion. Why would women need a distro of their own? What inherent properties of current Linux distributions would provide any kind of barrier to a woman working with Linux? Would a Woman's Linux be a pandering "Distribution for Dummies" that sought to remove all the "manly difficulties" in setting up and maintaining a real Linux or UNIX distro? I don't think the difficulties of an OS like Linux, as compared to, say, the MacOS are experienced only by women. I know plenty of men who are computer idiots and probably have difficulties operating a light switch, never mind Linux... Would, say, Evi Nemeth want to use the Linux for Women distro? What would make it just for women? Why wouldn't women just want to integrate more fully into the existing Linux community? Why not contribute to the Linux kernel core? Show the men that they can compete on equal footing, without a special Chick Linux... What is the point of building some kind of separatist distribution? It seems counter to my anti-segregationist, "we should all get along" inclinations that I have about everything. It would just give the lamer men an excuse to give women a hard time ("Oh, you just use chick Linux, what do you know?") and separate women from "real" Linux users... I see no advantage to it, other than some kind of pride of having "their own" Linux, but lots of disadvantages that outweigh the advantage...
The Internet as a media venue for candidates is not that interesting, and using the net as a way to hold two-way conversations between voters and candidates is only more interesting if the conversations are of any depth, and if they take place with those voters other than the ones who already get to have discussions with the candidates (large donors, heads of local party organizations, etc.) in forums moderated by other than the standard media organs. Essentially the Internet is only interesting as a news medium for political issues if it remains outside the control of corporate news monopolies - and people actually pay attention to other news and political sites than those run by the entrenched establishment players.
What is the really interesting possibility of the Internet in politics, one which will cause Washington to kick and scream a whole lot more before they'd give in to it, is the idea of using the Internet (and strong authentication and encryption technology) to allow for direct voting for major political offices. This idea of Direct Democracy isn't generally new, but doing it on the scale of a US national election would require the communications and computing power that the Internet now provides. However, the Electoral College system is well entrenched, and a lot of power brokering goes on in this realm, so this change would not be easily made... it is, however, the major promise of the Internet in terms of actually returning politics to the hands of the people...
"Too bad you can't inflict penalties on companies that do dumb things..."
Actually, you can. You can use your power as a consumer to refuse to do business with them. Take your business elsewhere. Tell your colleagues to take their business elsewhere. Circulate the news, and tell people what you think about it.
That's a lot of what/. is all about, after all, but we can take it beyond the confines of/. as well...
I think this frivolous patent already infringes on the frivolous patent by The Thinking Media briefly described here (oddly, all news about this patent is now missing from The Thinking Media's page):
Yes, you could make root access impossible but from the console. You could completely remove the su program, for example. You can also disable all SUID and SGID programs, depending on the UNIX you're using (and in some cases, whether or not you have the source).
More mundanely, you can restrict root login to the console, then using a combination of encrypted connections (such as SSL), proper security management of running services (um, Webmasters, read the WWW Security FAQ...and other info at: http://www.w3.org/Security/), and such tools as IPchains you CAN make UNIXen secure...
Kernel hackers can put together very secure UNIXen when needed. In fact, there are UNIXen which have been made C2 secure, but I am unaware of Mac or Win systems that have done this.
Yes, if you use a less feature-rich OS like the MacOS you need to do less work to make it secure (to the levels it can be)... just like it's easier to repair a Volkswagen than a Ferrari...
Though it is more difficult, you can still hack Macs. The ease of doing so depends on how the Mac is configured, and whether or not third-party apps such as Timbuktu and Mac command line and telnet add-ons are running. Even without such enticing additions, if things such as AppleShare are left on, there are holes.
Like any system, if it is properly administered it can be secured, and if not, there are ways to break it wide open...
If you need the power of a better OS such as Linux or BSD, you'll need to do more work to get the same level of security than on a Mac, but it can still be done. It's all in the skills of the administrator...
Software wills itself into existance because there is no single corporate entity which claims authorship / ownership? Ummm... I don't think so... I think that the OpenSource programmers who write the code will it into existance...
However, let's say you have a program which, through methodologies of evolutionary computing, is actually self-controlling in a reasonable sense of the phrase... (Though, as humans wrote the EC code, not self-creating...) How does a computer program accept responsibility? What punitive measures would a computer program be subjected to in the case of failure? How does a human or business entity or goverment extract compensatory damages from a piece of software?
If a patient dies due to the failure of a machine, the hostpital faces some kind of punishment, and if there is nobody to pass it on to, they are not interested in using that machine.
The authors of the program could be sued, but they probably don't have enough money, or any binding contractual liability as to the performance of the program, to be worth suing...
However, OpenSource medical software could be put into use through a RedHat-like software company which would verify the software, accept liability if it failed, provide tech support, etc. They'd, obviously, charge for this... but so does RedHat...
Slashdot Mirror
This is a very unfortunate precedent. I do not know anything about Finnish law, so I don't know if there is a way for this law to be overturned by an equivalent of the US Supreme Court, but if this law stays in place this is a very bad precedent indeed.
What defines a computer virus? Is ANY self-replicating code to be considered a virus? If so, a lot of legitimate research into Genetic Programming would be covered by such laws.
If, to be a virus, it is decided that the program must be "malicious" (as is the case with this Finnish law), what defines malice in a computer program? The article states "intent to harm"... These grey area laws are always dangerous (posession with intent to sell in the US is a good example). Also, what if the intent was to harm, but in a controlled setting, such as research or at an Anti-Virus development firm, and the virus got out accidentally?
You're obviously too biased and ignorant to understand, but actually VM based systems are very useful for some real world issues such as system portability (Java runs on lots of stuff, few portability issues except with AWT UI stuff), easier verification of program correctness (pointers screw that right up), possibility of supercompilation (can't do that properly with pointers, either), etc. There is also a development time issue for very large systems, as we did not have to write our own memory management schemes, and the issue of this version of the system having been written primarily by scientists first, not programmers, making Java a good choice for ease of use.
Java compilers (and supercompilers, which would run prior to a compiler, actually) are being developed, and while the compilers may not speed things up much, supercompilers will.
So, if the JVMs don't totally suck, Java is about as good as C++, and only 2-3 times slower than C.
With JNI we could rewrite very computationally intensive parts of the program in C, as well. As things like TowerJ and HotSpot are ported to Linux and other platforms, speed-ups occur there, as well.
All in all, if you're working in C++ you can get roughly the same performance from Java... (it will require a lot of tricks to get C level performance... maybe even the Java chip... but so what? most of the system doesn't need it... many systems don't...)
Always fighting amongst yourselves. You are a weak race, and you will be assimilated. Real war, cyberwar, it makes no difference - we shall crush you.
We will nuke you from orbit, and take all your copies of Quake II (oh, and your bodies and souls).
Technological systems that benefit the public are very good, especially when the public can have a say in their operation. There are, of course, potential abuses, but it's up to each individual to decide what they will use a trackable system for. If you don't want the government (or advertising company dataminers) to know how much Pizza you're ordering, walk to the Pizza shop in person and pay cash...
At this time, you still have that option... and we'll only lose such options if people choose to give them up en-masse... There are still alternatives, though they often involve more work (like leaving your home).
The choice is in all our hands: total convenience and no privacy, or forgo some convenience and keep some of the old, inefficient, and difficult-to-monitor systems in place (there can be a balance, you can have some of both)...
Let's see, Iridium has lofted approximately 200 communications satellites (presumably they don't have cameras on them, but I haven't gone up and checked...), and they're just one company. There are thousands of satellites in orbit, and many are in *geosynchronous* orbit (that means they orbit over one place, NY City, for example) because they're expected to be there 24-7 for a specific purpose (usualy comm relays). If private telcom industry can loft hundreds of satellites, the US government or a private security firm can also loft enough satellites to cover the US with 1m resolution imaging cameras.
;-> ) then all you need to do is have the images properly tagged for time and place, and you have a database of continuous, or near-continuous (1-10 second frame delays wouldn't make much difference) video footage of the US (or Europe, or wherever) which is keyed on GPS coordinates and time. All you need to do to find the footage you want is to look it up in the database by its (GPS, time) coordinates...
Now, if you use the "excess" bandwidth of the whole slew of communications satellites in orbit to send the images constantly down to a sufficiently powerful server farm (hey, you could run it on Linux!
So if good guy claims he was at the Yankees game while bad guy was shooting someone on the Great Lawn in Central Park, just punch up those two locations and look for your guys (you'll have many thousands of frames to check through, but so what?). Hopefully they're looking up, or you can identify them by the tops of their heads (unless, of course, you're taking your images at the "right" angle for each meter), but other than that... you can find the meter you're looking for rather easily...
This is all bad. This is definate Big Brother stuff, and additionally, even if the imaging is of rather poor quality and your face is difficult to see (and there is certainly feature enhancement software to clear things up if the image is shot at an angle preserves enough information to do so), the Gov't have a way of convincing juries that what they say is a picture of you IS a picture of you, because "pictures don't lie"...
For all their good, powerful computers definately are presenting the possibility of a Panoptical surveliance society. Don't worry if you're a good guy, right? Well, that depends on what "good" is... What if you're a Communist or Pacifist or other "political undesirable" at an anti-government rally? What if you just feel like taking a stroll without it being recorded for posterity? Oughtn't that be your right?
Do the security benefits outweigh the privacy infringement in this case? They do not seem to, frankly...
Though a good number of the people who responded to this are obvious flamebaiters, I'll take a minute to follow-up anyway.
1) We're not using Java to gain in performance, obviously, we're trying to optimize performance
of a system already written in Java.
2) Solaris x86 JVMs also sucked. In fact, when we made the NT decision, JVMs on Solaris SPARC AND Solaris x86 were slower than on NT. Extensive benchmarking was done, using both our software, and simple benchmark tests.
3) Only one person suggested that maybe Linux does need a better JVM. It's ironic that the response is to attack our software (which you know nothing about), Java, and our intelligence, rather than to suggest that writing a good JVM would be useful... R&D folks are taking a liking to Java, and without a good JVM Linux will be unusable by a fair portion of the R&D community.
4) Actually, one of our people is writing a better JVM, though obviously it will be of little use to any of you...
5) Um, we don't need Beowulf "to run Java", we need a cluster or supercomputer to run the very complicated software we've written in Java.
It's funny, rather than being interested in how to expand the horizons of Linux and maybe try to understand why someone would want to use a VM based language like Java, people just get all uppity. Your computing paradigm is challenged, time to get defensive...
Whatever.
We're doing fine without Linux, actually, I just thought maybe some other Linux folks would be interested in writing a decent JVM, but we'll do it ourselves...
With Linux gaining acceptance for very large scale applications (Weather supercomputer and other applications of Linux clusters to computationally intensive problems, mostly for cost reasons (commodity hardware vs. custom)), it seems that some people think that Linux is up to or can be tuned to be up to the job of handling some of the largest applications around...
Things like IRC and Oracle stability are an issue of applications interacting with the OS, and perhaps these apps need patching and tuning as much as the Linux Kernel does. Many of these issues are issues of people comparing entire systems (including applications, and system admins) without taking into account the system variables (is the application ported? was it tuned for that OS? are the system admins of the two systems being compared of comparable skill?)
Clearly Linux has its weaknesses, but when analyzing it is much more useful to do a straight comparison than the touchy-feely anecdotal kinds of comparisons that people tend to make... and to know what you're comparing. To say "Linux works poorly with IRC server software" is not to say "Linux is bad for all large scale server apps"...
The Dvorak keyboard was invented by August Dvorak of University of Washington, in 1936. This particular Dvorak was a cousin of the composer Antonin Dvorak.
I work at a company that is working on a very complex artificial intelligence architecture, and for a variety of reasons it is written in Java (since the other most popular AI languages use VMs or are directly interpreted, expect the AI community at large to want good interpreters on Linux).
We looked at putting together a Beowulf Linux cluster to run our software, which is very memory and processor intensive, but Linux could not do the job because JVMs on Linux are absolutely terrible. We wound up on WinNT (we couldn't afford Suns, but plan to upgrade when we can) because the JVMs were the best.
Because people making large software systems are fed up with reengineering for new hardware, expect other people to start choosing Java for large, intensive applications that were previously written in C, Fortran, C++, etc.
If Linux can't compete with other OSes for running large Java programs, these projects will not be able to consider Linux as their OS of choice (which we all WANTED to do here, we were very upset to go to NT).
Right now the fastest Java environment we've found is Java 2 with HotSpot, running on NT (we're testing Solaris now, as we might be able to afford Suns soon). Can the Linux community do any better, or even as well? So far, no.
Well, that is an interesting notion. Why would
women need a distro of their own? What inherent properties of current Linux distributions would provide any kind of barrier to a woman working with Linux?
Would a Woman's Linux be a pandering "Distribution for Dummies" that sought to remove all the "manly difficulties" in setting up and maintaining a real Linux or UNIX distro?
I don't think the difficulties of an OS like Linux, as compared to, say, the MacOS are experienced only by women. I know plenty of men who are computer idiots and probably have difficulties operating a light switch, never mind Linux...
Would, say, Evi Nemeth want to use the Linux for Women distro? What would make it just for women?
Why wouldn't women just want to integrate more fully into the existing Linux community? Why not contribute to the Linux kernel core? Show the men that they can compete on equal footing, without a special Chick Linux... What is the point of building some kind of separatist distribution? It seems counter to my anti-segregationist, "we should all get along" inclinations that I have about everything. It would just give the lamer men an excuse to give women a hard time ("Oh, you just use chick Linux, what do you know?") and separate women from "real" Linux users...
I see no advantage to it, other than some kind of pride of having "their own" Linux, but lots of disadvantages that outweigh the advantage...
Well, I think they should call it
Bitch'n'Linux
But, alas, I fear nobody else will realize
that such a double-entendre name would gain
the distro instant fame and glory...
Someone also just suggested to me that they
change the name of the man command to woman...
The Internet as a media venue for candidates is not that interesting, and using the net as a way to hold two-way conversations between voters and candidates is only more interesting if the conversations are of any depth, and if they take place with those voters other than the ones who already get to have discussions with the candidates (large donors, heads of local party organizations, etc.) in forums moderated by other than the standard media organs. Essentially the Internet is only interesting as a news medium for political issues if it remains outside the control of corporate news monopolies - and people actually pay attention to other news and political sites than those run by the entrenched establishment players.
What is the really interesting possibility of the Internet in politics, one which will cause Washington to kick and scream a whole lot more before they'd give in to it, is the idea of using the Internet (and strong authentication and encryption technology) to allow for direct voting for major political offices. This idea of Direct Democracy isn't generally new, but doing it on the scale of a US national election would require the communications and computing power that the Internet now provides. However, the Electoral College system is well entrenched, and a lot of power brokering goes on in this realm, so this change would not be easily made... it is, however, the major promise of the Internet in terms of actually returning politics to the hands of the people...
"Too bad you can't inflict penalties on companies that do dumb things..."
/. is all about, after all, but we can take it beyond the confines of /. as well...
Actually, you can. You can use your power as a consumer to refuse to do business with them. Take your business elsewhere. Tell your colleagues to take their business elsewhere. Circulate the news, and tell people what you think about it.
That's a lot of what
I think this frivolous patent already infringes on the frivolous patent by The Thinking Media
1 2_11861,00.html
- media.html
briefly described here (oddly, all news about this patent is now missing from The Thinking Media's page):
http://www.internetnews.com/IAR/article/0,1087,
And which I discussed briefly here:
http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/comments-thinking
My phrase "E-Data Mentality" applies to the DoubleClick patent, as well...
Yes, you could make root access impossible but from the console. You could completely remove the su program, for example. You can also disable all SUID and SGID programs, depending on the UNIX you're using (and in some cases, whether or not you have the source).
More mundanely, you can restrict root login to the console, then using a combination of encrypted connections (such as SSL), proper security management of running services (um, Webmasters, read the WWW Security FAQ...and other info at: http://www.w3.org/Security/), and such tools as IPchains you CAN make UNIXen secure...
Kernel hackers can put together very secure UNIXen when needed. In fact, there are UNIXen which have been made C2 secure, but I am unaware of Mac or Win systems that have done this.
Yes, if you use a less feature-rich OS like the MacOS you need to do less work to make it secure (to the levels it can be)... just like it's easier to repair a Volkswagen than a Ferrari...
Though it is more difficult, you can still hack Macs. The ease of doing so depends on how the Mac is configured, and whether or not third-party apps such as Timbuktu and Mac command line and telnet add-ons are running. Even without such enticing additions, if things such as AppleShare are left on, there are holes.
Like any system, if it is properly administered it can be secured, and if not, there are ways to break it wide open...
If you need the power of a better OS such as Linux or BSD, you'll need to do more work to get the same level of security than on a Mac, but it can still be done. It's all in the skills of the administrator...
Want to hack Macs, or prevent it? Go to:
http://freaky.staticusers.net/index2.shtml
http://www.securemac.com/
http://www.l0pht.com/~spacerog/
Um... ok...
Software wills itself into existance because there is no single corporate entity which claims authorship / ownership? Ummm... I don't think so... I think that the OpenSource programmers who write the code will it into existance...
However, let's say you have a program which, through methodologies of evolutionary computing, is actually self-controlling in a reasonable sense of the phrase... (Though, as humans wrote
the EC code, not self-creating...)
How does a computer program accept responsibility?
What punitive measures would a computer program be subjected to in the case of failure?
How does a human or business entity or goverment extract compensatory damages from a piece of software?
If a patient dies due to the failure of a machine, the hostpital faces some kind of punishment, and if there is nobody to pass it on to, they are not interested in using that machine.
The authors of the program could be sued, but they probably don't have enough money, or any binding contractual liability as to the performance of the program, to be worth suing...
However, OpenSource medical software could be put into use through a RedHat-like software company which would verify the software, accept liability if it failed, provide tech support, etc. They'd, obviously, charge for this... but so does RedHat...