Fighting for Open Access

As you may have noticed, this weekend the online world has been filled with news of and responses to the suicide of the young American activist Aaron Swartz. Many excellent personal tributes have been written about the man and his achievements, but here I want to concentrate on the just one aspect: the incident that led to his arrest and probably to his suicide too. Here's how Techdirt explained the situation:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Lords, Bless 'Em

More sanity from the House of Lords:

The government has been defeated in the House of Lords over the issue of keeping peoples' DNA and fingerprints on the police national database.

Peers backed a Conservative amendment calling for national guidelines for deleting material by 161 votes to 150.

Ministers said the safeguard was not needed and could hinder anti-terror operations but critics said innocent people should not be stigmatised.

The safeguard was not needed, presumably, because we no longer have any right to be regarded as innocent until proven guilty - the government's operating principle being that we are *all* potential terrorists, and therefore should *all* be under surveillance at all times and in all ways.

The Liability of Closed Source Software

It's a pity that reports from the House of Lord's Science and Technology Committee are so long, because they contain buckets of good stuff - not least because they draw on top experts. A case in point is the most recent, looking at personal Internet security, which includes luminaries such as Bruce Schneier and Alan Cox.

The recommendations are a bit of a mixed bag, but one thing that caught my eye was in the context of making suppliers liable for their software. As Bruce puts it:

“We are paying, as individuals, as corporations, for bad security of products”—by which payment he meant not only the cost of losing data, but the costs of additional security products such as firewalls, anti-virus software and so on, which have to be purchased because of the likely insecurity of the original product. For the vendors, he said, software insecurity was an “externality … the cost is borne by us users.” Only if liability were to be placed upon vendors would they have “a bigger impetus to fix their products”

Of course, product liability might be a bit problemtatic for free software, but again Schneier has a solution:

Any imposition of liability upon vendors would also have to take account of the diversity of the market for software, in particular of the importance of the open source community. As open source software is both supplied free to customers, and can be analysed and tested for flaws by the entire IT community, it is both difficult and, arguably, inappropriate, to establish contractual obligations or to identify a single “vendor”. Bruce Schneier drew an analogy with “Good Samaritan” laws, which, in the United States and Canada, protect those attempting to help people who are sick or injured from possible litigation. On the other hand, he saw no reason why companies which took open source software, aggregated it and sold it along with support packages—he gave the example of Red Hat, which markets a version of the open source Linux operating system—should not be liable like other vendors.