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Perhaps those reasonable people are making a moral judgement when they decide to use proprietary code in a certain circumstance: they're deciding it's morally a

Perhaps those reasonable people are making a moral judgement when they decide to use proprietary code in a certain circumstance: they're deciding it's morally acceptable. And maybe it isn't morally acceptable in some circumstances. Like when transparency is required in order to facilitate accountability and peace of mind. It's immoral to have closed-source voting machines. But is it immoral to rely on closed-source search algorithms? The answer to that is less obvious. Either way, moral issues affect code all the time.

tzs 10y ago
I don't see how there is anything fundamentally different between voting machines and search engines as far as the morality of closed-source goes. For a voting machine, I'd say it is immoral to have voting systems that are unreliable or unverifiable. The problem of making a reliable and verifiable voting system is mostly orthogonal to the open/closed nature of the software in voting machines. For open-source voting machines, how does the voter know that the binary code running on the machine they are using is actually compiled, unmodified, from the right source? Even if they can somehow determine that, there is still the possibility of bugs. To get reliable and verifiable voting system, what you need to do is design the system so that if the voting machine software does not count votes correctly that will be detected elsewhere in the system and can be corrected. An example of how to do this is David Chaum's "Punchscan" system, or it's successor, Chaum and Ron Rivest's "Scantegrity II" system.
legulere 10y ago
> It's immoral to have closed-source voting machines. Bullshit. The problem is voting machines in general. They are too complex and you cannot observe how they work. This opens up elections to get manipulated regardless if open source is used or not. This is also not a moral problem, but a technological problem. The moral problem is in setting the requirements, the technological problem is in solving them. What I do not understand in regards to voting computers, is why you need the computer part anyway. If you want fast counting, punch cards suffice.
- jedikv 10y ago
  Why even have a punch card? Just a paper and pen/pencil should suffice.

tzs 10y ago

I don't see how there is anything fundamentally different between voting machines and search engines as far as the morality of closed-source goes. For a voting machine, I'd say it is immoral to have voting systems that are unreliable or unverifiable. The problem of making a reliable and verifiable voting system is mostly orthogonal to the open/closed nature of the software in voting machines. For open-source voting machines, how does the voter know that the binary code running on the machine they are using is actually compiled, unmodified, from the right source? Even if they can somehow determine that, there is still the possibility of bugs. To get reliable and verifiable voting system, what you need to do is design the system so that if the voting machine software does not count votes correctly that will be detected elsewhere in the system and can be corrected. An example of how to do this is David Chaum's "Punchscan" system, or it's successor, Chaum and Ron Rivest's "Scantegrity II" system.

legulere 10y ago

> It's immoral to have closed-source voting machines. Bullshit. The problem is voting machines in general. They are too complex and you cannot observe how they work. This opens up elections to get manipulated regardless if open source is used or not. This is also not a moral problem, but a technological problem. The moral problem is in setting the requirements, the technological problem is in solving them. What I do not understand in regards to voting computers, is why you need the computer part anyway. If you want fast counting, punch cards suffice.

jedikv 10y ago
Why even have a punch card? Just a paper and pen/pencil should suffice.