“With the proposed Uniform Computer Information Transaction Act
(UCITA) threatening the free-software movement, ZDNet News Senior
Editor Robert Lemos caught up with Stallman, president of the Free
Software Foundation, in India.”
“ZDNet: What will be the effect of UCITA on the free software
movement?”
“Stallman: UCITA would make it harder for us to avoid
liability for bugs that turn up in the free software we develop —
while giving proprietary software developers a very easy way to
avoid all liability for their products, even for faults that they
know about in advance. This is grossly unfair.“
“UCITA would also give proprietary software developers a way to
prohibit reverse engineering. They could then promulgate secret
formats for distributing and storing data and stop us from
implementing free software to handle those formats. We would be
unable to provide you with software to access your own data.”