newspeak

Professional Archiving Solution | OPENARCHIVE.

Big Data is here to stay (though it’s not quite proven itself as useful as imagined) and it analyzing it–making sense of the data that are captured–is only part of the picture. It has to be stored, archived. How this is done is as much of interest as how the data are used (and by whom). And as with other things that are actually socially important, or can be, I’m in favour of commons-based solutions, open standards, open source. The interesting thing about open source and archiving, however, is related in OpenArchive’s Product Page (emphasis mine):

Features and functions of OPENARCHIVE

OPENARCHIVE offers all the functions of ARCHIVEMANAGER, except for two features. There can be no audit compliance according to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (GDPdu and GoBS in Germany) because publishing the  source code would be detrimental to those legal requirements. And, at the present time, no independent software manufacturers (ISV) have yet certified their applications for OPENARCHIVE.

That legal requirement is interesting. And it also flies in the face of my no doubt miserable understanding of the issues. For the security of the data are not compromised by making the code ensuring their security open. Openness relates to the elements making up the machine and even how it is supposed to function, not to the output. It’s worth investigating, I’d think, how Sarbanes-Oxley really intersects with open source issues here.