Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

In that world we’d just be transitioning to 32-bit software and still running MS-DOS since it’s certified. Linux would never ever have broken through. Who can trust code developed by open source cowboys? Have we verified all their credentials?

There are some industries where the massive cost of this type of lock down — probably innovation at 1/10th the speed at 100X the cost — is needed. Medicine comes to mind. It’s different from software in two ways. One is that the stakes are higher from a human point of view, but the more significant difference is that ordinary users of medicine are usually not competent to judge its efficacy (hence why there’s so much quackery). It has an extreme case of the ignorant customer problem, making it hard for the market to work. The users of software usually can see if it’s working.

View on HN

You, of course, say that like it's a bad thing.

I'll say video games would certainly be worse.

I don't know if we'd be worse off with a lot of other software and/or public internet sites of 20-to-30 years ago. A lot of people are unhappy with the state of modern consumer software, ad surveillance, etc.

Probably a lot less identity theft and credit card/banking fraud.

For social media, it depends on if that "regulate things to ensure safety" attitude extends to things like abuse/threats/unsolicited gore or nudes/etc. And advertising surveillance. Would ad tracking be rejected since the device and platform should not be allowed to share all that fingerprinting stuff in the first place, or would it just be "you can track if you check all the data protection boxes" which is not really that much better.

I'm sure someone would've spent the time to produce certified Linux versions by now; "Linux with support" has been a business model for decades, and if the alternative is pay MS, pay someone else, or write your own from scratch, there's room in the market.

(Somewhere out there there's another counterfactual world where medicine is less regulated and the survivors who haven't been victimized by the resulting problems are talking about how "in that other world we'd still be getting hip replacement surgery instead of regrowing things with gene therapy" or somesuch...)

A lot of the things people are upset about are not related to this issue and not something licensing engineers would fix. They're products of things like market incentives.

What you're really talking about when you talk about "locking down the field" is skipping or suppressing the PC revolution. That would make things like opaqueness and surveillance worse, not better. There would be nothing but SaaS and dumb terminals at the endpoint and no large base of autodidact hacker types to understand what is happening.

I have wondered if medicine wouldn't be a lot more advanced without regulation, but I tend to think no. I think we have the AB test there. There are many countries with little medical regulation (or where it is sparsely enforced) and they do not export sci-fi transhumanist medical tech. They are at best no better than what more regulated domains have. Like I said, I think many things about medicine are very different from software. They're very different industries with very different incentives, problem domain characteristics, and ethical constraints. The biggest difference, other than ethics, is that autodidactism is easy in software and almost impossible in medicine, for deep complicated practical as well as ethical reasons.

For software we do have the AB test. More conservative software markets and jurisdictions are vastly slower than less conservative ones.

I think you're proving their point. There are different kinds of software that require different kinds of regulation.

A reliable, un-bloated OS? Sign me the eff up.

Go check out VxWorks or the like. only 20K a seat, build tools at a similar price, and then oh joy, runtime licenses required to deploy the sw you wrote.

Which are reasonable prices when lives are at risk.

Yes, I know RTOS are not general purpose, this is NOT apples to apples, but that is what that kind of reliability, testing, safety certification, etc. costs.

Or QNX for the price of Windows, for a certified UNIX.

I disagree. Mature open source projects last long enough without significant disruption to still be relevant after they make it onto the certification exam. Products, not so much.

Investing time building familiarity with proprietary software is already a dubious move for a lot of other reasons, but this would be just one more: why would I build curriculum around something that I'm just going to have to change next year when the new CEO does something crazy?

And as bad as it might be for many of us who hang out here, killing off proprietary software would be a great step forward.

You're assuming the process would not be instantly subjected to regulatory capture by for-profit companies and by universities with an interest in inserting themselves into the required licensure pipeline.

Microsoft in the 1990s would have used the regulatory and licensure process to shut down open source. They tried to do it with bullshit lawsuits.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com