[ Linux Today reader Claus
Sørensen, Chairman of KLID writes: ]
“Erkki Liikanen Commissioner for Enterprise and Information
Society European Commission state in his speech at Information
Security Solutions Europe (ISSE 99) Berlin, 4 October 1999 that the
solution to the problem concerning secure payment systems is
non-proprietary and open source systems.
Quoted from the speech:
“4. WHAT ELSE CAN WE DO?
I realise I have spent quite some time talking about legal
issues. It is certainly a major building block of a favourable
environment for on-line security. In the time that I have left, I
would like to focus on a two issues which have struck me lately,
and which are also crucial.
The first issue concerns the European cryptographic industry. It
is a strong industry, it has state-of-the-art technology, and it
has therefore the potential to impose itself on world markets. It
would certainly highly benefit from improved regulatory conditions,
but there is another major obstacle to its expansion.
Currently, the desktop computing market is dominated by a few
systems. This wouldn’t be a problem in itself if those weren’t
proprietary systems. Building security solutions for systems when
one has no access to the source code is certainly a major
challenge. In fact, it means that there is a whole range of
security products which European industry cannot supply.
The solution to this problem certainly lies in non-proprietary
and open source systems. This is the key to unlocking the potential
of the desktop computing security market. This would also clearly
be in the end users’ interest. Not only would users enjoy a wider
choice of security solutions, but they would also have a greater
safety guarantee.”
You can see the whole speech
here.”
Claus Sørensen, Chairman of KLID (Commercial Linux Association in
Denmark)