61–70 of 89 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
OpenOffice isn't defunct, it is still in development: https://www.openoffice.org .
It's nothing, compared with LibreOffice development pace.
You wouldn't know the background motivating this decision unless you have been a frustrated user of the nearly non-functional software of Bulgarian state institutions. Ludicrous amounts of money are paid by the government to a selected niche of companies for developing all kinds of useless websites which barely work under load and have abysmal implementations with blatant security holes. This law can act as a safegua…
By none other than CGI, HQ'd down the street from me in Montreal?
Governments and Big Corps have quite an ability to spend money :). Understand that it's a game of distribution of power - not outcomes, and you understand it a little bit better :).
Exceptionalism and efficiency is for small companies and startups, for the most part.
I've personally seen the Dutch government spend millions implementing open source software. This was something that could've been fixed for a fraction using a closed source solution. After a couple of years, the project was canceled and the closed source solution was implemented anyway. I'm not saying that using OSS is a bad thing. I don't, however, think that 'OSS only' is the solution to the problem at hand.
You wouldn't know the background motivating this decision unless you have been a frustrated user of the nearly non-functional software of Bulgarian state institutions. Ludicrous amounts of money are paid by the government to a selected niche of companies for developing all kinds of useless websites which barely work under load and have abysmal implementations with blatant security holes. This law can act as a safegua…
You mean like the Obamacare website that cost nearly $2 Billion to develop? By none other than CGI, HQ'd down the street from me in Montreal? Governments and Big Corps have quite an ability to spend money :). Understand that it's a game of distribution of power - not outcomes, and you understand it a little bit better :). Exceptionalism and efficiency is for small companies and startups, for the most part.
I wrote more details on this on HN at the time, ask and I'll dig some up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the electoral code, rough translation: "Independent observers are allowed to verify whether the digital fingerprint of the system in the data centers matches the publicly announced one"
The more people insist such verification is possible, the less you should trust them, they don't understand the issues[1]. It might be possible to come up with some provably verifiable scheme but they are very sophisticated and revised often because people still come up with ways to skew them[2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI [2] https://evoting.bismark.se/verifiable-electronic-voting/
We have hundreds of years of experience learning how to secure paper ballots. Complexity creates attack surface, and usually fails to provide all of the security features provided by a simple paper ballot that is hand counted in view of all parties.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And how do you ensure that the actual deployed code doesn't differ from the one posted on GitHub?
From the electoral code, rough translation: "Independent observers are allowed to verify whether the digital fingerprint of the system in the data centers matches the publicly announced one"
You wouldn't know the background motivating this decision unless you have been a frustrated user of the nearly non-functional software of Bulgarian state institutions. Ludicrous amounts of money are paid by the government to a selected niche of companies for developing all kinds of useless websites which barely work under load and have abysmal implementations with blatant security holes. This law can act as a safegua…
You wouldn't know the background motivating this decision unless you have been a frustrated user of the nearly non-functional software of Bulgarian state institutions. Ludicrous amounts of money are paid by the government to a selected niche of companies for developing all kinds of useless websites which barely work under load and have abysmal implementations with blatant security holes. This law can act as a safegua…
How exactly is open source going to fix that? The same companies can write the same garbage code for too much money with open source software just as easily. In fact they're probably already using open source.
You wouldn't know the background motivating this decision unless you have been a frustrated user of the nearly non-functional software of Bulgarian state institutions. Ludicrous amounts of money are paid by the government to a selected niche of companies for developing all kinds of useless websites which barely work under load and have abysmal implementations with blatant security holes. This law can act as a safegua…
That is actually not that bad considering the fact that to sell to the government usually requires going through a lengthy bureaucratic process that involves metric tons of meetings, paperwork, constant back-and-forth, changes and revisions, guarantees, insurance, etc, that costs the seller easily north of 100k+ just to get started.
Meaning the cost is not in the product nor service, it is rather in the process.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean like the Obamacare website that cost nearly $2 Billion to develop? By none other than CGI, HQ'd down the street from me in Montreal? Governments and Big Corps have quite an ability to spend money :). Understand that it's a game of distribution of power - not outcomes, and you understand it a little bit better :). Exceptionalism and efficiency is for small companies and startups, for the most part.
In all fairness to CGI and company, the government set them up for abject failure, no dream team of programmers could have succeeded with it taking the role of integrator for which is did not have the talent or realization of the testing required, so many delayed decisions, and last minute changes (like a very big one a week or two before), being forced to use an unfamiliar database that, worse, implemented an unfami…
An 'unfamiliar database' does not begin to cover it.
Neither do 'last minute changes'.
It was a boondogle from the start, failure in gov, failure in planning etc., failure to understand what they are doing.
Google Engineers had to come in and fix it.