I have been making myself scarce on my own website of late; when you move back to your homeland after 12 years and pick up a very exciting new position with a place as cool as Rambøll Informatik, you'll tend to drop off the radar for a bit.
Thanks to Pinse I now have a long(er) weekend, and there is one thing I wish to piss and moan about. I want to call out the Danish Welfare Ministry.
The story goes like this. Eight Danish municipal authorities are moving towards e-voting and the Welfare Ministry (for byzantine reasons which with any luck will be tackled in the comment section of this post) is stakeholder in requirements definition and tender formulation. And the Welfare Ministry has warned the municipalities against mandating open source.
Let's have that little beaut again. In bold. Because, you know, this is a non-authoritative blog and I might just have mistyped. The Danish Welfare Ministry has warned against mandating open source for -voting systems.
Bjarne Thomsen, Vice Director for Frederiksberg Kommune (a municipality which has been a driving force for the e-voting project) had the following to say (roughly translated):
Following up, Mr. Thomsen mentions that the reasoning seems to be that it is difficult to make money off of open source and that the bids would therefore end up looking unnecessarily expensive.
Quote out of the way, I will be helpful and interpret the Welfare Ministry's position:
I am not paying taxes to have such breathtaking ignorance in the civil service, even if the public sector salary scale is a bit remiss. Breathtaking is not a superlative; open source belongs in many places, but that which is special about e-voting is precisely this:
In most fields, open source systems make a good alternative to prorietary ones. In e-voting, proprietary systems make a calamitous alternative to even the poorest open source system or to paper and pen.
Skam dig, Karen.
