Petition Launched To Get The White House To Open Source Healthcare.gov Code

Mike Masnick | Techdirt | October 21, 2013

from the should-have-done-it-before dept

After the disastrous technological launch of the healthcare.gov website, built by political cronies rather than companies who understand the internet, there has been plenty of discussion as to why the code wasn't open sourced. At that link, there's a good discussion from On the Media, with Paul Ford, discussing what a big mistake it was that the government decided not to open source the code and be much more transparent about the process. It discusses the usual attacks on open source and why they almost certainly don't apply to this situation.

And, now, a "We the People..." petition has been launched, asking the White House to open source the code to Healthcare.gov:

Release to the open source community the source code to healthcare.gov, specifically all code written by CGI Federal.

It is believed that the enrollment issues with healthcare.gov are likely due to poor coding practices in components that are unavailable to the world's development community to evaluate. Code funded by taxpaying citizens should be made available to the general public as government funded development is generally public domain software. Please release the code so we may help fix any found issues.