Re: [d@DCC] Health privacy and license agreements

From: "Alan DeKok" <aland _-at-_ ox.org>
To: General Discussion <discuss (at) digital-copyright.ca>
Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2002 22:33:29 -0500

Russell McOrmond <russell@flora.ca> wrote:
>   I can tomorrow write a piece of crap software, release it under the GPL, 
> and have nobody look at it ever.   This piece of software is Free 
> Software, was eligible for peer review, but never had any review because 
> the software was not of interest to anyone.

  The eligibility is important, IMHO.  Commercial software has *no*
method for doing peer review.  In fact, if it gets widely accepted,
you can't tell if that's because it was useful, or it was because the
users were bribed/threatened.

  In contrast, if free software gains wide acceptance, you're prreety
sure that it's becaue everyone agrees it's useful.  There's no money
to pay people to accept it, so that method of false acceptance is out.

  In addition, once free software is widely accepted, you're also
guaranteed that all of the bad guys will look at it, to discover ways
to attack it.


  The fact that Apache runs, what, 60% of the web servers on the
planet, and has had ~2-3 successful attacks shows how well this model
works.  IIS generally gets accepted and used because of
marketing/propoganda, and has had probably 100 times the issues that
Apache has.

  Alan DeKok.
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