A morning in proprietary hell

Story: This week at LWN: A couple of lessons on the hazards of proprietary softwareTotal Replies: 5
Author Content
jimf

Aug 11, 2006
8:58 AM EDT
What pops into my head, is the scenario of a doctor, who's car is hijacked by the automated parking machine, as he goes to vote on the Diebold voting machine. He finally returns to his office, only to find that he is locked out of his medical records, and, that one of his patients is in critical condition. Who wants to volunteer to be the doomed patient who's proprietary monitoring system has just discovered a bug?

So, civil rights have been circumvented, property has been unnecessarily detained, critical health information is denied, and an important life support device has failed... Not bad for a morning's work. Unlikely? Sure. Impossible? By no means.
grouch

Aug 11, 2006
10:57 AM EDT
Our mossst preciousss Eye Pee mussst be protected! It's oursss! Givesss usss our feesss! We wantsss it!
jdixon

Aug 11, 2006
11:43 AM EDT
All right grouch, no more all night Lord of the Rings sessions for you.
mjjohansen

Aug 15, 2006
12:21 AM EDT
No, that's Steve Ballmer's morning exec briefing.
dcparris

Aug 15, 2006
7:51 AM EDT
This is just soooo apropos.
Sander_Marechal

Aug 15, 2006
8:38 AM EDT
Talking about proprietry hell, at my company there was a rather expensive external programmer to fix some legacy application. He spent about 4 hours looking for the problem, only to discover that the couldn't get the project to work because a certain library had it's license expired.

And what was this piece of high flying technology that we apparently needed to relicense? A bunch of FTP hook for VB6 :-X

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