Saturday, July 16, 2005
Voting needs: open source, or public open source projects?
An interview with Avi Rubin and David Dill available on SourceForge news:
http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/07/06/182210
explores the key needs in developing trusted software for voting.
There is still a huge difference between a vendor publishing open source, which by most informed analysis is almost worthless since it can still be mostly opaque, and public open source projects, which are the real deal.
There are two public open source projects working at the moment developing core components for use by voting system solutions - one is the OVC (Open Voting Consortium), and the other is OASIS EML - http://emlvoting.org that basically are following the same principles of creating baseline benchmarks as reference implementations.
Once we have these foundation peices available that vendors can then implement solutions around - then we will have crossed another very significant bridge to transparent election solutions that are trustworthy.
See the slides in the TLV primer link for more in depth analysis of what such public open source delivers and why.
Until then calls for open source for vendor solutions are nobly intended, but unlikely to achieve very much in terms of better transparency in voting software.
http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/07/06/182210
explores the key needs in developing trusted software for voting.
There is still a huge difference between a vendor publishing open source, which by most informed analysis is almost worthless since it can still be mostly opaque, and public open source projects, which are the real deal.
There are two public open source projects working at the moment developing core components for use by voting system solutions - one is the OVC (Open Voting Consortium), and the other is OASIS EML - http://emlvoting.org that basically are following the same principles of creating baseline benchmarks as reference implementations.
Once we have these foundation peices available that vendors can then implement solutions around - then we will have crossed another very significant bridge to transparent election solutions that are trustworthy.
See the slides in the TLV primer link for more in depth analysis of what such public open source delivers and why.
Until then calls for open source for vendor solutions are nobly intended, but unlikely to achieve very much in terms of better transparency in voting software.
# posted by DRRW @ 11:48 AM 
