Duncan wrote: > On Mon 07 Jul 2003 07:25, Buchan Milne posted as excerpted below: >> Having the source to software which you distribute is useless if you >> cannot fix bugs and distributed the fixed software. > > Interesting discussion, here. I'm glad to read that it may soon be GPLed.. > However, to the specific point addressed by the quote above.. > > I wouldn't call available source unable to be modified USELESS. Insufficient > for Mdk, definitely. Insufficient philosophically to a Software Libre > advocate, definitely. Useless, not entirely.
Well I agree with that. > At least one specific use (or lack of it in this example) that has been a > complaint about MS-ware, for instance, is that it was impossible to > security-verify it. MS has addressed that to a large extent with its shared > source and government source review programs, thus muting to some extent at > least one specific point of the Peruvian documents, that a government would > be irresponsible if it chose to use closed source since it is entrusted with > a large amount of private data of its citizens, and there was no way to > verify that the data remained private, because the source was unavailable. > Other points in those documents, including both the data hostage situation > and the local economic impact of exporting those $$ vs. keeping them local, > certainly remain, but the one point has been to some extent blunted, at > minimum. But you picked a pretty bad example. MS-shared-source doesn't allow you to recompile the code, so there's no way to be sure the code they hand you is what's actually behind the binaries you're running.
