The Election Technology Council (ETC) is a trade association or consortium composed of the major voting system vendors: ES&S, Sequoia, Diebold (now calling themselves "Premier") and Hart InterCivic. They recently put out a paper titled, OPEN SOURCE: Understanding Its Application in the Voting Industry [1]. Ostensibly, the paper is to help policy makers understand "open source." As you may have guessed, it's full of obfuscations, half-truths, and outright lies.
At one point they cite Open Voting Consortium's legislative efforts and say,
Based on the lack of currently viable open source developed
voting technology, it is clear that advocacy groups are
encouraging a disclosed software model rather than a true
open source requirement.
They know that we've promoted software disclosure as a precursor to true open source. The software we've developed is all true open source -- free software with a General Public License. Why would they lie about this?
I will write an open letter to ETC and publish that on our web site. In the mean time, I have been discussing this online at Dan Wallach's blog [2].
Feel free let others know about this, and let ETC know what you think, too. Thanks!
Alan Dechert
p.s., we need your support. Please contribute at http://openvoting.org
__________________________
[1] http://www.electiontech.org/documents/opensourcefinalonline.pdf
[2] http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/dwallach/open-source-vs-disclosed-source-voting-systems
At one point they cite Open Voting Consortium's legislative efforts and say,
Based on the lack of currently viable open source developed
voting technology, it is clear that advocacy groups are
encouraging a disclosed software model rather than a true
open source requirement.
They know that we've promoted software disclosure as a precursor to true open source. The software we've developed is all true open source -- free software with a General Public License. Why would they lie about this?
I will write an open letter to ETC and publish that on our web site. In the mean time, I have been discussing this online at Dan Wallach's blog [2].
Feel free let others know about this, and let ETC know what you think, too. Thanks!
Alan Dechert
p.s., we need your support. Please contribute at http://openvoting.org
__________________________
[1] http://www.electiontech.org/documents/opensourcefinalonline.pdf
[2] http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/dwallach/open-source-vs-disclosed-source-voting-systems
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