Losing focus

Losing focus

Posted Jun 14, 2003 19:41 UTC (Sat) by jneves (guest, #2859)
Parent article: Opinion on Brazil making Open Source mandatory in government

In my opinion, Tony Stanco doesn't understand the issues at stake. The issue here is not competition, nor price, nor reliability. A government is not a company. The issue is that my government (in this case Portugal) has my signature in systems they don't know how they work and they can't know how they work (reverse-engineering is illegal for security auditing).

If anyone accesses the systems that manage either the passport, identity card or driver's license processes, someone can simply put me in a lot of trouble, including, getting me in debt with banks and signing contracts in my behalf without my authorisation.

This is a real problem, and one that they can't fix without refusing proprietary software.

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