War on Open Source The outrage surrounding the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) is well founded and under reported. The red flag is being waved, warning this legislation gives the federal government unprecedented power to collect information on every American citizen and violate “civil liberties.” If you read the bill, it’s worse than any commentary written about CISA. This bill opens the door for spying on American citizens, the profiling of the habits of law abiding individuals, violation of antitrust laws, and ending the promise of exponential innovation in cyber land. There isn’t a computer program out there that doesn’t contain code written by someone who was never paid for their work; the code was written as a labor of love. The vast majority of computer code that exists was developed by someone for no other reason than “it was cool.” There is a large network of people that write code as a “labor of love,” “because it’s cool.” It’s called Open Source Development or Open Source Community. Many have never heard of an Open Source Community, but you have heard of “the hacker.” Most think “the hacker” only destroys all the work on your laptop and forces you to buy expensive anti-virus that slows your computer down. Well there are bad apples in every group. Most “hackers” are non-professional programs who like writing code. “Hackers” didn’t invent the internet but they did make it what it is today. “Hackers” also fundamentally believe we’d still be living in 1995 if all software was protected by copyright and patent law. They are correct. CISA puts a target on the back of everyone who loves writing code. It allow big corporations to incriminate Open Source Developers. It allows big business to target Open Sources developers with immunity: SEC. 6. PROTECTION FROM LIABILITY. (a) MONITORING OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS.—No cause of action shall lie or be maintained in any court against any private entity, and such action shall be promptly dismissed, for the monitoring of information systems and information under subsection (a) of section 4 that is conducted in accordance with this Act.
Posted on: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 17:23:16 +0000
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