Turning over the keys to citizens
The UPA has promised a more transparent government, which makes open source software vital……Martin Demello
The UPA has promised a more transparent government, which makes open source software vital……Martin Demello
The 2005 Right to Information Act was a significant milestone for India, a firm commitment to openness and transparency. The UPA’s promises of a public data project has only strengthened that commitment, promising to sweep away the nation’s dusty piles of secrecy and bureaucracy. But with increasing computerisation comes a related, but often overlooked imperative  that all government software be open source.
If you have been keeping up, however peripherally, with developments in computing and information technology, chances are that you have encountered the term “open source” before. At its heart, the concept is quite simple. A computer wants instructions in its “native language”, machine code. Here is a small sample of machine code:
wOoCa^Fd^^3^Txz,|9dY $*Uxi8D^@sdu^_^e+@/
Programmers, however, work with a more human-readable language, which is then translated to machine code. This “source code” looks something like this:
if weather = “rainy” then display image of(rain) else display image of(sunshine)
Now, if you sell commercial software, you need not give anyone your source code. The translated machine code is all that your users need to run your applications. Indeed, most companies see the source as something to be protected; customers are delivered opaque machine code that they can use without being able to see how it works. The user gets his program, which is what he cares about, the company gets to protect its business secrets, and all is well. Right?
“Wrong”, say a growing number of people. Enter the free, libre and open source software movement, which believes users should have access to the source code of any program they purchase, and the freedom to modify it, as fundamental rights. This is naturally enough, a controversial topic in the business world  few companies want to give away the secrets behind their software, or the right to control its use. The debate takes a more serious turn though, when what is involved is not commerce but government, and what is being hidden are not business secrets but the implementation of policy and law-enforcement. The salient issue here is not “freedom”, but transparency.
In the US, where ubiquitous computerisation has long since become a fact of life, two applications have thrown the problems of closed-source into sharp relief. The first is the Diebold electronic voting machine. The principle is straightforward  it displays the available options to the voter, records the votes and sends them to a central counting-house to be tabulated. In practice, the Diebold is an overcomplex, labyrinthine machine, the correctness and integrity of which have been called into question by several watchdog bodies.
Now that should be easy to resolve  simply appoint a taskforce to audit the machine for correctness and security, ensuring that it does what it is supposed to do, and nothing it is not supposed to. Well, it would be simple  except for the fact that the Diebold is closed-source. There is no transparency in how it works  the disturbing, terrifying fact is that a private company can, through malice or incompetence, invisibly influence an election in one of the world’s most powerful countries.
Exhibit number two is the breathalyser, a device which estimates the amount of alcohol in a person’s bloodstream. It is commonly used as a “field sobriety test”, and its results are admissible in court. Since a person can be convicted on the basis of a breathalyser test, it is imperative that it be above reproach. In practice, however, how the sensors are read, and how their readings depends on software that is, again, proprietary and closed-source. Several breathalyser manufacturers have indeed been taken to court and asked to turn over their code  which has been found to be buggy and error-prone. Others have resisted on the grounds that revealing their source would “compromise trade secrets”, something that, sadly, seems to outweigh human rights in much of the world.
These problems may seem comfortably far away, with computers only beginning to work their way into our daily lives. However, the central issues are both relevant and urgent. A government, after all, runs primarily on information, and it is crucially important both that that information not be compromised, and that it can be shown not to be compromised. And the more we allow computers  increasingly a critical link in the chain  to become impenetrable black boxes, the less we can trust that entire chain. Freedom of information is a vital, transformative principle; let us not render it pointless by neglecting trustworthiness of information.
The writer is a programmer and open source enthusiast.