Annual FSF Membership Meeting Mar 15 at MIT

[der.hans]

Am 27. Jan, 2008 schwätzte fouldragon at aol.com so:

> One thing which always fascinated me is that we aren't seeing
> lregulatory attempts to bully software into being, if not Free, then at
> least open, when there's auditability issues.

The data formats need to be free and open for a variety of reasons.

1. in the case of the company using it, it's the company's data and
doesn't belong to a 3rd party company making the software

2. reliability of interaction between programs/vendors

3. ease of automation

4. ease and reliability of accounting audits

I'm certain there are more reasons.

> The obvious one is voting machines, but I'd expect there'd be huge
> auditibility requirements for gambling machines, payment processing
> kiosks, basically, anything that you give money but don't recieve a
> product you can immediately review.

I believe there is a lot of audibility of gambling machines. The political
ease of actually getting an audit is another question altogether.

It's funny that the electronic voting machine companies claim it's
impossible to get reliable printers for the voting machines, but the same
companies make ATMs and there would be no tolerance for ATM machines
without reliable printed receipts.

ciao,

der.hans
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