informIT: Searching for Substance: The Road to Safe Software

"It never seemed to matter how the software we used was made. It didn't seem to matter much who made it either. We just grabbed it unquestioningly. That's changing. Today's software can definitely be bad for you, whether it's due to viruses, spyware, dialers, bugs, or merely baroque license agreements. Today you can hardly tell whether a particular piece of software is going to be good for you--or not..."

"Once upon a time, most of the consumer software you could feasibly acquire was produced by a commercial engineering business, such as Microsoft or Apple. That simple product-distribution model used a wholesale/retail chain like that used for cans of soup. You bought steak from the butcher and bread from the baker..."

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• iTWeb: Open Source: It's Always the Customers Who Benefit(Aug 18, 2004)
• North County Times: Try Open Source for Hardware(Aug 09, 2004)