It will be perfectly legal for you to continue to use your current flavor of UNIX. It will not, however, be legal for any other company to develop a new version of this OS without it meeting the terms of this bill. And what if someone decides to do this underground or outside the country? I doubt they really care. What they know is that companies will not use this product for threat of legal reprocussions. It will drive virtually all companies to abandon UNIX implementations unless they want to stay with what they have a very long time. It will force all new implememtations to .NET. And once that happens, what's to stop them from limiting which "clients" can access these "approved" servers? Of course it will be done in the name of security.

Just because you can avoid the direct impact of this at the moment doesn't mean that you'll like the world that's left beyond your router. That is, if you can even get to it.

Rich

We may be arguing at cross-purposes here, but I see a big picture that doesn't hang very well.

While it never does a company good to defy the law, there are many work-arounds available that completely undermine laws. In the same way that a blatent monopoly like microsoft can get away from a legal case which was really open and shut, other companies could easily sidestep the worst of this law.

*Why can't a company bring a UNIX up to these standards? There's a lot of good crypto stuff around, it could be welded into a coherent product.
*Law only applies in America... Canada is really close. Ping times are comparable. Create a 'venture company' to start internet services in Canada and then you aren't responsible for what they use.
*Even big, stupid companies are getting wary of MS. In the seventies and eighties, companies moved away from super-service providers like digital and IBM for fear of being locked into a manufacturer. Same applies now

Most importantly, though, are the people caught in the middle of all this. Microsoft gets its money from hordes of people who give it to them. What if that stopped?

I don't think this will fail because citizens suddenly unite to prevent a gross abuse of freedom. I think this will fail because nobody will want to upgrade. I can see most companies moving their servers north of the border, and most users not upgrading because they are sick of paying money for something that doesn't work.

The sales figures for win2000 (the first decent MS product since solitaire) show that people are very wary of MS in general. With the first hint of controversy everybody will go back to win98, saying "It does everything I need it to".

Companies only have to hold out for about 6 months after this comes in, and then MS will suffer amazing losses. With no viable product anywhere in the industry, the government will be forced to delay it, and water it down until it doesn't really exist anymore.

____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

IANAL, but after several readings I think that this is all justified under the Commerce Clause.

And oddly enough, the bill seems mostly directed at copyright protection. At best this is legal teeth for security by obscurity. I'd like to see this bill have additional segments that lay out strict liabilities for faulty security devices. In fact, I think we need a software production liabilities act (proprietary software gets to limit its warranty by what reasoning again?) long before we need this crappy security bill.