Could closed source programs be illegal one day? It might in the public sector if a proposal becomes law in France. The proposal reads as follows:‘a single private provider, which forces citizens and public organisations to become customers…in the end, significantly stimulates abuses of dominant position in the market…they can not access the source code; this…makes it impossible to fix bugs that the software publisher refuses to fix or to check that there is no security trap in strategic software. Public administrations sometimes use, without even being aware of it, software which communicates sensitive private information to foreign companies or organisations’ Among other things it calls for ‘…Administrations should only use software which source code is available to them in order to guarantee future evolution and maintenance.’ Is the handwriting on the wall?

I am not a proponent of government intervention in private industry, but the proposal has many good points, that apply to many entities and enterprises particularly medicine. It addresses the problem of proprietary data encoding, intraoperability, customer security and companies that go out of business leaving their customers stranded.

Possibly the future of American Law?