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Comment by yeukhon | Hacker News Reader

Open sourcing does not solve problems. The ultimate issues are (1) government paid an incompetent contractor the job and (2) people who were to suppose to oversee the contract probably has no effing idea how to do software engineering.

This means we need to hire better contractors and hire managers who have technical background and require an audit periodically.

Open sourcing does not solve these two issues. healthcare.gov is not Django project. You can't install that system and the code is going to be big few people will be able to do anything about it. Plus, even if you could read the entire source code, accepting pull request, going through 3rd party security validation is going to take a while and people are probably not going to take your pull request.

What we need is to put the incompetent people out of job and hire good one.

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See that just it, we don't actually know if it was the contractors. Maybe the contract was subpar, maybe the government signed off on a bad design, or maybe the contractor did screw up. Open source the code and all of the mystery will be gone, well know exactly what the root cause was. Open source the contract, the code, and the emails and notes involved in picking the winner for this proposal.

Without the facts, everyone's just guessing or making things up. Open source everything on this. It's our money, what was it spent on?

Linux solved a problem, VLC solves a problem, MySQL solves a problem. Its ridiculous to say "open source doesn't solve problems".

We need to do those things you mentioned in addition to open sourcing the code. Its our code let's see what we paid for.

Linux is a software,not a service. Linux is an operating system and is supposed to work for everyone's commodity hardware. healthcare.gov is a service, not a software you can reuse.

He didn't say "open source doesn't solve problems", he said "open sourcing doesn't solve problems". The verb is very different to the noun.

Yes there are open source softwares that once completed are efficacious in solving the problems they were designed to solve. The point yeukhon was making was the act of open sourcing a project alone doesn't somehow inherently solve problems in its development. At least in this case not the two enumerated problems he sees with the healthcare.gov project.

So wikileaks didn't solve any problems open sourcing secrets?

Open source is a development model that encourages sharing and redistribution of source code. It is not a term that can be applied to the making public of government secrets, which has nothing to do with the encouragement of information sharing.

When Wikileaks gets their hands on government secrets and puts it on a website, they haven't made those secrets 'open source'. That word doesn't even make sense in that context.

Even if I get my hands on the source code of Windows and put it in a GitHub repository, I still haven't made Windows open source.

> Its our code let's see what we paid for.

That is a different petition to the one that has been posted, which states that the reason for open sourcing the code is "so we may help fix any found issues".

The "let's see what we paid for" argument is an appeal to the more general proposition that there should be public scrutiny of public money. There already exist mechanisms for accessing taxpayer-funded content held by government (including source code) under FOI and other legislation. Unless there is some inadequacy in the operation of those laws, I think they answer the point.

Nonsense. Open information on public expenditures is a painful process and you know it. So by that token the petition should simply be responded to by the whitehouse with a "file a FoIA". Balderdash and red herrings all around. It's public money, it's public code: period. Your point is a distraction, and you know it.

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