Nathan wrote:
Just out of curiosity, is there a concious reason why the church restricts access to the program and it's source, or is that just a historical byproduct? I mean, it's obvious that the church can't give access to the data these programs use since the data iteself is confidential, but what does it have to gain by restricting access to the program itself? It seems like the church would naturally be a big open-source proponent, as it's not selling its software (as far as I know) anyway.
I think the Church needs to be absolutely sure the membership data is used the way it was intended to be used. If the source were accessible, well-meaning but misguided clerks could more easily make mistakes and leak personal information about members. If the leak were discovered, people might stop trusting the Church with their personal information, and might even sue the Church, reducing the Church's ability to fulfill its mission to perfect the saints. Thus any software that has access to private membership information is probably not a good candidate to release as open source software.
However, the Church currently seems optimistic about open source software for most other work. Unfortunately, lots of Church software is already tied to proprietary agreements. In practice, building software to be released as open source software requires a committment to open source right from the start of the project.
Shane _______________________________________________ Ldsoss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ldsoss.org/mailman/listinfo/ldsoss
