[CAVO] FW: Travis County RFI

Lawrence Rosen lrosen at rosenlaw.com
Mon Jun 15 18:15:53 UTC 2015


Brent, I'm glad you forwarded Patrick's email to Travis County. 

 

Richard Fontana is right. If Travis isn't careful in selecting an OSI-approved open source license, the open source community won't accept that software. We won't trust a restrictive license.

 

An acceptable open source license is one important way for an election software system to promise effective security and reliability, while leaving the software itself open for inventiveness and creative enhancements. 

 

This isn't about a single vendor but about software consumers. It is OUR freedom to vote that we seek to guarantee. A well-chosen license can help make that happen. 

 

/Larry

 

 

From: Brent Turner [mailto:turnerbrentm at gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, June 15, 2015 9:10 AM
To: Patrick Masson; CAVO
Subject: Re: [CAVO] Travis County RFI

 

Thanks Patrick -

 

This is very helpful and has been forwarded to Dana Debeauvoir, Micheal Winn  and the others in Travis County. 

 

I'm sure we have our work cut for us as Microsoft is a partner in this project-- but we will continue to push for real open source rather than alternative licensing schemes. 

 

BT 

 

 

 

On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 8:33 AM, Patrick Masson <masson at opensource.org <mailto:masson at opensource.org> > wrote:

Brent (an CAVO list),

As you will see I reached out to Richard Fontana (one of the OSI Board Directors) to share the RFI you forwarded as it raised a few concerns for me and I thought his assessment would help.

My first impression was that the RFI seems to indicate that the County will assign a license that they call "open source" but allows the County or Consortium to control who can use/fork it, "usage rights for actual elections as well as derivative rights (as in using the code to create a derivative voting system) would be controlled by Travis County". This would not be permissible under an OSI approved open source license and would violate the Open Source Definition.

Secondly the RFI includes several references to open source, but does not include specifically "OSI Approved License" (§14, page 138), for example:
- "released to the public as “open source” under a license"
- "vendor may propose to make other components of the software open source as they deem appropriate"
- "shall be made open source"
- "shall be released an open source and functioning reference implementation"
- etc.

I expect you would want to reach out to Travis County to raise this issue, but expect Richard might have more information. Also Larry might have some thoughts on that language as well.

We'd be happy to help,
Patrick 

P.S. re. Twitter account, Thanks, I will just include the CAVO URL in any relevant tweets I post. 


On Sun, 2015-06-14 at 21:18 -0700, Brent Turner wrote: 

CAVO does not have a Twitter account 

 

On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 7:22 PM, Patrick Masson <masson at opensource.org <mailto:masson at opensource.org> > wrote: 

Brent,

What is CAVO's twitter account? I can't find it.

Thanks,
Patrick

On Sat, 2015-06-13 at 12:00 -0700, Brent Turner wrote: 



" Source code for specific modules relating to third-party verification of the public bulletin board and related published election artifacts would be published under a "suitable" (as determined by Travis County and/or consortium) open source license; "...     


On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 6:42 PM, Brent Turner <turnerbrentm at gmail.com <mailto:turnerbrentm at gmail.com> > wrote:

http://traviscountyclerk.org/eclerk/Content.do?code=News.StarVote

 

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