…the Minnesota Supreme Court has upheld the right of drunk-driving defendants to request the source code for the breathalyzer machines used as evidence against them, but only when the defendant provides sufficient arguments to suggest that a review of the code may have an impact on the case.
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The best (or perhaps worst) use of a breathalyzer. 😀
This should be required for any embedded system involved in public policy as part of said system’s audit trail.
Brian: Agreed, and I’m thinking specifically voting machines. What are you thinking?
I would add software that is used in research of any kind.
Jason, Greg:
Indeed. Anything that can wind up in a courtroom or a research journal should be at least open source, if not public domain, especially if public funding is involved.
I might point to an old program called NIH Image that was somewhat common on the Mac platform as a substitute for Photoshop — it was written by an NIH programmer (unfortunately in Pascal, making it a dusty deck these days) and included some great tools for image transforms that were especially useful for medical purposes. I believe the VA also has some top-notch medical records software that is public domain, but almost nobody uses it. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that any software that is developed by the government or on the government’s dime should be public domain or open source; given that it’s already paid for, there’s no good reason that anything of that nature shouldn’t be free to the taxpayers.
I am very familiar with NIH image, and have used it quite a bit in research. BTW, a version was later writen in Java (Image-J).