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How open is open enough for electronic voting? (NewsForge)
NewsForge revisits
e-voting. "Among those with apprehension about open source
elections software and systems, somewhat surprisingly to some, is
Australian developer and senior lecturer with Australian National
University Clive Boughton, who helped design the eVACS open source, GPL
election software used in Australian elections in 2001."
(Log in to post comments)
tobacco doctors Posted Aug 31, 2004 19:46 UTC (Tue) by ccyoung (guest, #16340) [Link] yes, he has a competing product.
How open is open enough for electronic voting? (NewsForge) Posted Sep 1, 2004 0:11 UTC (Wed) by himi (guest, #340) [Link] Having been taught by Clive for several units at ANU, I think I can safely say that he's a smart man who hasn't pulled himself out of his roots in software development. He's a fan of specification as the be-all and end-all, rigorous procedures, and things like "executable UML" as an alternative to all this messy programming stuff . . .
I also strongly suspect that the success of eVACS was in large part due to the programmers that Clive was lucky enough to hire - including Andrew Tridgell, Dave Gibson, Stephen Rothwell, and several other Canberra based OSS developers. Which is ironic, considering what he's now saying.
Incidentally, he gave me a distinction and a high distinction - I'm not being bitter, this is an honest opinion ;-)
himi
How open is open enough for electronic voting? (NewsForge) Posted Sep 1, 2004 1:50 UTC (Wed) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] It seems that the principals of Software Improvements don't realisethat developing code with secure programming and CASE tools has no bearing on the way authors should choose to license their software. Of course, for the software to be regarded as Free, the *original* source -- ie. the source as passed to the CASE tools -- must be released. This is of limited use to the community if the required CASE tools are proprietary -- but Software Improvements is actually in a position to do something about this as well, if it so desires. If they do understand this, then the only reason for them to abandon open-source methodology would be to achieve vendor lock-in. Software freedom is about the rights of the user, as well as about spreading the software to the corners of the globe. The various electoral commissions should think hard before buying a non-free solution.
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