In a followup to a previous blog posting, I read in today’s headlines that NASA has corrected their position and decided to disclose research that they had planned to destroy—a victory for transparency and for public safety.

The news report I read was from CNN.

Now, if we could just get more companies to be more forthcoming about disclosing for information about their “near-misses” and system crashes we could raise the standards of software development and deployment for everybody. Until then, users who believe it is prudent to “trust but verify” have only one choice: open source software, the only verifiable source.