On Wednesday 25 December 2002 01:54 pm, Kapil Karekar wrote:
- LUG meet on 12 Jan. 2003 @ VJTI
Hi Luggers!
- The third option, in my opinion, suits well to product based
companies. The company should be bound to release the source code of the product in the event of - Support being discontinued for the product. - The company is being bought by some other company. - The company is closing down. This option sheilds product based companies from hijackers. It also gives the option to the clients of the company to support themselves when support is no longer available.
How about an organization who check the source code and maintains a copy of the source code with itself. It will be issuing certificates to the softwares that companies develop. Every company who wants to sell their software should have a certificate from this organization. For example a government organization called Software Checker (SC) will be responsible to test source code of every major softwares like operating system , databases, etc. A company who likes to gain more clients will try to get such certificates from SC(here the SC organization can charge them for it). The source of idea is cryptography - when two people dont trust each other they need to trust a third party. Here the 3rd party is SC. So the source code does not get leaked, while the client is happy that the source code is secure to use and does not have any back door trojans, etc. If for cryptography we can trust Verisign (Microsoft company) then we can always trust someone for source code.
This ofcourse is easier said than done.
Keep your opinions rolling...
Cheers :-)) Kapil Karekar Libre Technologies
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