Making Elections Open and Transparent

A group of concerned citizens called the Advocacy for Open Systems in Elections is offering a free, open source solution for automating the counting of election results. Ito Gruet, a member of the group, was interviewed by Erwin Oliva of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, and the video of the interview is available on the Inquirer website as “Pushing open source solutions for elections“.

Gruet revealed that the group advocating the use of open standards and open source software for the automated election system, which would help ensure the transparency of the electoral process. Gruet explained:

Basically it’s to ensure that we are able to track and trace back to a source document and audit the results of the elections. And what we are proposing is the we make this process tranasparent to the public… to all the voters. Transparent in terms of the technology to be used, so we should be using open standards. We believe that the software should be open source so that people in the know can look at it, can review, and see if it’s really a working system. Transparent in terms of the data itself, which means that results should be easily verifiable by the public, and anybody can do their own tabulation.

Ya Gotta Hear This (Updated)

I thought that I had heard the worst ravings and silliest nonsense from some of SCO’s people concerning their claims about Unix and Linux. SCO, after all, claimed that some of their code was in Linux, but never managed to prove it.

(Image on the right is from the film “Reefer Madness.”)

After over six years, it seemed that the case was winding down: Judge Dale Kimball ruled that Novell, not SCO, still owned the copyright to Unix; and SCO filed for bankruptcy. Despite some news that SCO might be bought out and get enough money to continue the case, to me it pretty much boiled down to when — not if — SCO would just plain lose once and for all. Now, like some bad gas emanating from a crypt, we hear this latest whopper from SCO CEO Darl McBride, as reported by Ars Technica in “Deluded SCO CEO on witness stand: ‘Linux is a copy of UNIX’“:

McBride said that SCO holds the rights to UNIX and that “many Linux contributors were originally UNIX developers.” Specifically, he said, “We have evidence System V is in Linux,”—directly contradicting what Sontag had previously testified. Due to the witness exclusion rule invoked by both parties, McBride was not present during Sontag’s testimony and wasn’t aware of what had been said. McBride’s claims also directly contradict internal SCO memos from 2002, which reveal that the company’s own extensive source code audits had uncovered no UNIX code in Linux. McBride attempted to reinforce his argument with analogy. “When you go to the bookstore and look in the UNIX section, there’s books on ‘How to Program UNIX’ but when you go to the Linux section and look for ‘How to Program Linux’ you’re not gonna find it, because it doesn’t exist.” Then came the real humdinger, and my jaw dropped when I heard the following come out of his mouth: “Linux is a copy of UNIX, there is no difference [between them].”