A couple of lessons on the hazards of proprietary software [LWN.net]

A couple of lessons on the hazards of proprietary software

Posted Aug 10, 2006 4:48 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (subscriber, #6227)
In reply to: A couple of lessons on the hazards of proprietary software by dlang
Parent article: A couple of lessons on the hazards of proprietary software

Indeed, the problem here is *not* proprietary software, but proprietary formats and "software as a service" business models. I have used many proprietary software packages in which all the user data was stored in accessible formats.

Licensing which requires continual payments should always be looked at with fear. The Dr. Notes example could be an even worse story; the company could have gone out of business, and the new monthly passwords could have been gone forever even if the clinic had been willing to pay increased rates.

People need to be careful with any system, open source or not, which does not allow the ability to backup and process the user's data with other software. I could create some sort of online service using nothing but Free Software (and release all of my custom code, scripts, and even configuration data), but if there's no way to get your data out of that service, then the second my server goes down you've lost.

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A couple of lessons on the hazards of proprietary software

Posted Aug 10, 2006 9:55 UTC (Thu) by Soruk (guest, #2722) [Link]

Quite agree. Sale of support on an ongoing basis is one thing, but I refuse to go anywhere near software that requires continual support payments to just keep running (rentware). If it were to continue to run, just no vendor support available, that would be a different matter altogether. Or the other way that some virus scanner vendors use is you pay once for the software, and you pay a subscription for the updates. When you choose to cancel your subscription your AV software will no longer get the updates but will still stop viruses it already knows about.

A couple of lessons on the hazards of proprietary software

Posted Aug 10, 2006 20:53 UTC (Thu) by jstAusr (guest, #27224) [Link]

Proprietary software *is* the problem here. With freely licensed open source software the problem does not exist. If you are allowing someone else to store your data, that is a different situation with similar problems. However, it does not reduce the multitude of problems with proprietary software. If *all* people were honest, trustworthy, and put the well being of others at least on equal standing with their own well being, then proprietary software would be less problematic. The security and other risks of proprietary sofware are high and hidden. Free access to your data is only half the problem, your data really isn't usable unless you intend to reproduce the program that accesses that data. Don't be a fool use FLOSS.

A couple of lessons on the hazards of proprietary software

Posted Aug 11, 2006 6:50 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

if you can understand the data format you don't need any particular software to access it.

and FOSS software doesn't nessasarily equal flexibility in accessing the content (see the articles about the gimp not having a documented file format until the last week or so as a prime example)

yes, with FOSS software you can reverse engineer a data format more easily, but unless the software authors agree with (and maintain compatability with going forward) the specs that you reverse engineer it's a purely temporary documentation, which could be as bad as any propriatary software (albeit without as strong a lock-in, but for many large FOSS projects, the users are mostly along for the ride, and have to adapt to whatever file format changes the project introduces, until such time as the annoyance factor growes large enough for the project to be forked, so don't completely dismiss the lock-in aspect)

A couple of lessons on the hazards of proprietary software

Posted Aug 14, 2006 21:04 UTC (Mon) by leoc (subscriber, #39773) [Link]

Obscurity through complexity is NOT the same thing as obscurity through secrecy. So long as you have access to the source code to the version of the GIMP you are using, then you have a 100% accurate set of "documentation" on how to load and manipulate the data. Yes, you could lose the source to the version you are using, but then all your hard drives and backups could gte destroyed in a fire, too. Storing information in digital form is fundamentally risky, and losing the source code to a critical peice of infrastructure is something you can screw up, but noone can walk into your place of business and TAKE the source code from you. With closed source software, they can. That's the point.