Pleading guilty to one count of intentional damage to a protected computer, Singla faces a maximum prison term of 10 years, though he may not ever see the inside of a cell.
The court was recommended to instead sentence Singla to 57 months of house detention due to his suffering an “extraordinary” rare and incurable form of cancer. Any delay to his surgery, should the cancer recur, may render his condition inoperable, according to the plea agreement.
The decision to recommend the alternative to incarceration was also influenced by a “dangerous” vascular condition, from which Singla also suffers.
Ironic that the guy found guilty of disrupting other people’s access to healthcare may avoid prison because he needs ready access to healthcare.
NHS England said no company involved in the FDP would be able to access health and care data without the explicit permission of the NHS.
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Earlier this year, one official likened it to using Microsoft Word online. The cloud has access to that Word document, but the user would not expect Microsoft to be looking at that document, they said.
Oh good - administrative controls, rather than actual technical ones, “preventing” misuse/abuse of sensitive data. What could possibly go wrong?
Thanks for the share.
Obviously Perens is one of the FOSS OG figures and he makes a lot of good points. Lately the RHEL/IBM situation has shown a mere license text file isn’t going to keep megacorps from finding ways to circumvent the ideology and the purpose behind it. They have simply too many resources both in development and in legal departments and too many ways to work around the legalese of its intended purpose .
Also there’s been an increasing trend where products (Elastic etc) start off with FOSS license and as soon as they gain critical mass, they split their product and switch to their own FOSS-light license and gimped “community edition” downloads. Again, all still legally above the board, but at the same time completely ignoring the intended purpose of the license in the first place.
I think what Perens is proposing is too complicated. I understand that “contract” has far more binding legal fire power compared to a “license”, but as he also points out in the article, it complicates things to the point where it’s hard to adopt. The problem is of course far deeper than just licensing and has its roots deep somewhere in late-stage capitalism and deregulation of corporate entities and those are of course not problems that Perens or the free software community can easily solve. Unfortunately.
It’s clear that something new is needed and I appreciate the work he is doing. I’m not sure it’s the right direction to take, but can’t say I have any rabbits I can pull out of my hat either, so I’ll follow this with interest.
I felt like I was going crazy sometimes with how often people in the FOSS community insist that nothing is wrong when large companies are massively profiting off of unpaid labor that is meant to help people, by turning it into part of their closed-source product, so it’s nice to see that well-known figures in the community are starting to wake up to this being a problem.
I think that non-commercial-use clauses are a good way forward for certain projects, and commercial licenses for others. I wish that the upstream contrib requirements had taken off, but clearly Capitalism and the FOSS mindset aren’t compatible, and capitalism is more widespread.
If you let corporations have something for free, they’ll find some way to ruin it.
theregister.com
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