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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):

"The Welfare Ministry has issued recommendation that we should not require open source in the requirements contained in the tender. The Ministry has explained to us that this will reduce the attractiveness of the tender to potential bidders."

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:

We the Welfare Ministry wish to make public our complete and potentially fatal ignorance of what open source really is and what it means to a voting system to be proprietary, having failed to follow the Diebold saga. Further to this, we would like to exert the utmost effort to erase any doubt that we are unable to think our way forward to a revenue model for open source private ISVs. If the Welfare Ministry cannot conceive of open source revenue models then they must not exist. Also, we will be submitting to Folketinget a bill placing responsibility for viable software development and project revenue models in the domain of the Welfare Ministry.

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.