I hope this includes voting software.
Unless you have a way to ensure the code actually running on voting machines is the code that was published, there is no point.
US government commits to publish publicly financed software under FOSS licenses
21–30 of 110 posts
Re: US government commits to publish publicly financed software under FOSS licenses
#22It seems like they've cut a wide swath for (probably) exempting the most interesting of the software that could have been developed in the open. > Applicable exceptions are as follows: > The release of the item is restricted by another statute or regulation, such as the Export Administration Regulations, the International Traffic in Arms Regulation, or the laws and regulations governing classified information; > The…
This probably excludes pretty much everything except probably the most boring things - public information websites, etc. Anything within the DoD, for instance, will at minimum be tagged "for official use only", which already exempts it from FOIA requests, so I don't see this really opening much up at all.
Re: US government commits to publish publicly financed software under FOSS licenses
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could be wrong, but in most cases the US government buys appliances from companies like Diebold and they don't develop or contract software for voting. The best that can be done is regulation to force audits of the appliances like what Nevada does with casino slots. Even that would be a huge step up.
Might be a reason to long-term require all software used be open source and for that matter make it easy for a user to confirm that the system in use real-time is the system that's open-sourced too.
How do you allow a user to confirm this in real time? Hash displayed on th screen?
Re: US government commits to publish publicly financed software under FOSS licenses
#24Looking forward to https://github.com/nationalsecurityagency/PRISM et al
Help us, spy you.
Re: US government commits to publish publicly financed software under FOSS licenses
#25I hope this includes voting software.
Unless you have a way to ensure the code actually running on voting machines is the code that was published, there is no point.
Yes there is, it significantly raises the bar for maintaining plausible deniability while enabling voting fraud.
Right now if there is a bug that creates incorrect vote totals it would be very hard to prove it was done intentionally. If the software was required to be open source, then just the fact that they were running different software than was published would be strong evidence that it was intentional.
Re: US government commits to publish publicly financed software under FOSS licenses
#26It seems like they've cut a wide swath for (probably) exempting the most interesting of the software that could have been developed in the open. > Applicable exceptions are as follows: > The release of the item is restricted by another statute or regulation, such as the Export Administration Regulations, the International Traffic in Arms Regulation, or the laws and regulations governing classified information; > The…
The important thing is that this changes the default. Instead of the default being closed and needing to justify open-sourcing something, the default will be to open-source things and having to justify keeping something closed. That's huge.
Re: US government commits to publish publicly financed software under FOSS licenses
#27I hope this includes voting software.
There are actually foundations out there that do exactly that. If you're interested, OSET Foundation (http://www.osetfoundation.org/#welcome) has developed everything from ballot scanners to entry systems. It's all open source and they've been at it for about 10 years. They patented some of their systems and made the Secretary of commerce the owner of these patents, as far as I'm aware. Legislation is slowly moving towards adoption, given the potential reduction in cost.
Re: US government commits to publish publicly financed software under FOSS licenses
#28Looking forward to https://github.com/nationalsecurityagency/PRISM et al
It's funny you say that because that's the one NSA did voluntarily: http://www.informationweek.com/applications/nsa-submits-open... https://accumulo.apache.org/ ;)
Also: https://nifi.apache.org/
Re: US government commits to publish publicly financed software under FOSS licenses
#29Why is this limited to software?
Why not also publish publicly financed: * legal agreements * HR contracts * management presentations, best practices, and training material * marketing presentations and training material * creative output such as artwork and music
so that the rest of the world can use them for free..
Re: US government commits to publish publicly financed software under FOSS licenses
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Might be a reason to long-term require all software used be open source and for that matter make it easy for a user to confirm that the system in use real-time is the system that's open-sourced too.
How do you allow a user to confirm this in real time? Hash displayed on th screen?
Yes, that's correct, being able to download the code, hash it, and then compare it to the hash displayed real-time would be a first step towards enabling this.