The UK Post Office should have insisted on an open source system
The UK Post Office should at least have considered open source software for Horizon to enhance transparency, empower users, and avoid vendor lock-in, which could have prevented or mitigated the scandal’s impact. People like Richard Moorhead, Christopher Hodges, Alan Bates, and the long running Computer Weekly coverage all underscore the need for transparency and accountability, indirectly supporting open source principles, although direct advocacy is rare. For future systems, the Post Office and similar organizations should prioritize open source to prevent such injustices.
The establishment narrative often focuses on individual accountability rather than systemic issues like software design. But this overlooks how proprietary systems enabled the Post Office to deflect responsibility.
Open source software aligns with ethical principles of justice, autonomy, and resource stewardship, making it a compelling alternative for future public sector IT projects.
Thoughts?!
Why the Post Office paid £600m to stay shackled to the faulty Horizon system
Not owning crucial code has meant it has been unable to replace the system that led to a scandal.Nalini Sivathasan and Tom Beal (BBC News)
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Alex
in reply to yak • • •Care needs to be taken with big orgs like the NHS to not try and boil the ocean with massive IT systems. Concentrating on open interoperability standards allows for smaller more flexible contracts and the ability to swap out components when needed.
Open source licences would be the ideal default although at a minimum the purchasing org should have a licence that allows them (or subcontractors) to make fixes without being tied to the original vendor.
WalnutLum
in reply to Alex • • •Biggest problem to open source health adoption has been the extreme unwillingness to form an international standards group around diagnoses and labeling.
Closest we have is the WHO with ICD but for some fucking inane reason it's only used reliably by the second and third world. (Ironically this means most African countries have freakishly good digital MAR interop when they can afford to put in a system that uses those standards.)
onlinepersona
in reply to yak • • •Very likely that the people involved in the deal were corrupt. It wouldn't surprise anybody if they got a nice sum deposited into an offshore account, a free house, expensive art, or whatever else is used to hide corruption.
Unfortunately the opensource community is heavily disorganised. We don't have a group to represent us, market opensource, push for its use in public office, fight for compensation for maintainers and developers, and so much more. A concerted effort could possibly accelerate adoption and make it possible for more people to earn a living from opensource, not just the lucky few who can do it in their free time and transition to a paid/funded position.
Anti Commercial-AI license
Deed - Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International - Creative Commons
creativecommons.orgcolournoun
in reply to onlinepersona • • •killeronthecorner
in reply to yak • • •Crucial code doesn't exist, all code is disposable mess that tries to mimic a real world process; and it sounds like the post office fucked up by not even knowing how their own processes work in practice.
Their best option here would be to revert to pen and paper until they figure out how the hell they actually make money.
In the meantime, fire the board and exec team for not meeting their most basic fiduciary duties.
tiramichu
in reply to killeronthecorner • • •I did consultancy work as part of renewing and replacing ancient software systems for an insurance company, and it's amazing how little people actually know about how their own business processes are actually supposed to work.
Orgs are in the position where everyone who built a system is gone, and all the current people who work there defer to the system for how the processes work, without actually properly understanding the rules. And so the system itself becomes the arbiter of correctness.
This is obviously horrible because it ends up where nobody dares to touch the current system in case they break it in some way nobody understands.
We ended up speaking to people across the whole business to painstakingly work out what the rules really were, putting together a new system and effectively "dual running" that side-by-side with the old system, so we could compare outputs and make sure they were the same. In some case they were different, and in some of those cases it was actually because the old system was actually wrong, but nobody noticed!
It's a mess.
Horse {they/them}
in reply to tiramichu • • •isn't that how you get a tech cult?
like ComStar or the Cult Mechanicus?
lightnegative
in reply to tiramichu • • •100÷. I used to work for a bank and the lending team didn't even know how to calculate loan repayments. They just deferred to what the core banking system did.
The core banking system was written in a proprietary language in the 70's and machine translated into another (slightly newer) proprietary language in the 90's. At the time I wouldnt be surprised if management was patting themselves on the back for a modernisation job well done. Just get the computer to do the conversion, right? The sales guys of the new platform assured us they could migrate everything automatically and we always trust a sales guy!
Of course the machine translation is like reading machine code so very difficult to understand / follow / change. The developers working on it were in maintenance mode and everyone was afraid to touch it incase some calculation broke.
The point is that it's exactly what you described - the users were trained to push buttons and trust the system output without actually knowing what they were doing and if it was correct.
Pretty sure the bank recently got fined for compliance breaches as well. It's not because anyone there was bad, they just had no idea how anything was meant to work
killeronthecorner
in reply to tiramichu • • •Someone defined the process at some point though, and often it's documented. I've worked at several banks and large financial institutions and have had plenty of people tell me "I don't know how X works" but never "Nobody knows how X works".
I currently work at a bank and I'm yet to encounter anything that someone couldn't at least send me documentation for, however apocryphal.
The problem here is that it's fairly clear that the post office allowed Fujitsu to both define and implement the processes such that they are not compelled to provide the blueprint for them as part of the contract and they are now held to ransom over it.
This is the kind of colossal fuck up that heads should roll for, no less so as it is happening in the shadow of one of the biggest corruption scandals in British history.
tiramichu
in reply to killeronthecorner • • •I agree that it's a huge fuck up, my comment wasn't in defence of the post office, just a related story :)
Whenever I have delivered code for a client it has always been in a way where the client has complete ownership of the code and can maintain it themselves later (or ask a different company that isn't us to come do it) because that's the only sustainable approach, and all companies should absolutely demand that all work done for them is done this way.
killeronthecorner
in reply to tiramichu • • •abeorch
in reply to yak • •So this is an interesting thing. Obviously the functionality required by the #PostOffice is to a degree bespoke - but not considering ownership was a critial failure of the contracting process.
Interestingly I think that there is something that every #creditunion that outsources its #corebanking and other IT should consider - How locked into that offering they are and what happens if they want to change? #Opensource #banking solutions offer the ability to both switch vendors and also customise to their requirements realitively easily - I'm not sure how many use solutions based on #mifos or #fineract - I guess they are still fairly new.
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Blisterexe
in reply to abeorch • • •The fact they paid to have a custom system built and it's still proprietary and controlled by a vendor is crazy to me.
Also, hi friendica user!
abeorch
in reply to Blisterexe • •Well so many businesses do this because they believe that the vendor will somehow charge less if they can reuse that code... but if its highly customised thats unlikely . it just becomes a case of pushing the costs down the road.
Not many postal banking businesses in the world
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colournoun
in reply to abeorch • • •dwazou
in reply to yak • • •I'm not British. There are many things that I admire about the United Kingdom.
This is the nation that produced Agatha Christie, Jane Austen, George Orwell, JK Rowling, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Elton John, David Attenborough. Led Zeppelin, Aldous Huxley, JRR Tolkien.
But the one thing that disturbs me is the unbelievable level of corruption.
In Britain, political parties can raise millions of pounds from one single individual. Private corporations, including foreign corporations, are allowed to give large amounts of money to political parties. Several members of the UK parliament currently work as consultants and lawyers for large corporations such as Thames Water or HSBC. This is all legal.
Compare this to France.
In France, no individual is allowed to give more than 7000 pounds to a political party. Corporations are banned from giving money to political parties. Members of parliament are all banned from having second-jobs. And if you break these rules, an independent agency (HATVP) has the power to criminally prosecute you.
Why did France pass these tough rules ? Huge corruption scandals
France had one President (Nicolas Sarkozy) sell access to his donors
We also had one powerful MP (Francois Fillon) taking a second-job as a lavishly paid consultant for huge corporations
When the French media revealed these scandals, the French political class was so embarrassed that it actually forced them to take action.
The British had similar corruption scandals.
David Cameron was caught selling access to Downing Street in exchange of money:
theguardian.com/politics/2012/…
telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/…
Boris Johnson was also caught selling access to Downing Street in exchange of money:
ft.com/content/8c6041ff-a223-4…
Yet the British political class did... absolutely nothing !!! No reform...
Similar scandals have led to completely different legislative outcomes.
In Britain, the rot runs deep.
Inside Boris Johnson’s money network
Tom Burgis (Financial Times)ProfessorOwl_PhD [any]
in reply to dwazou • • •epithet for Great Britain when pursuing only its self-interest
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)RoundSparrow @ .ee
in reply to ProfessorOwl_PhD [any] • • •I'm not surprised by your bullshit, on topics of Russia, Ukraine, Hybrid Warfare on Lemmy media systems, psychological operations of Cambridge Analtycia, all that bullshit you are wanting concealed.
"Vladislav Surkov is the deputy prime minister of the Russian Federation and chief of staff of the Russian Government. He oversees a large array of government initiatives, including in area of innovation, education and culture. He is a trustee of the Skolkovo Fund and chairman of the Board of trustees at SkolkovoTech, and is actively involved with the government initiative to create a technology innovation park and ecosystem in Russia. Prior to his appointment at the Russian Government, Mr Surkov was the deputy chief of staff of the Russian President. He is widely attributed to the creation of the "Sovereign Democracy" concept in the last decade." - London School of Economics and Political Science. May 1, 2013
"Vladimir Putin, Conservative Icon. The Russian president is positioning himself as the world's leading defender of traditional values." - By Brian Whitmore. December 20, 2013. "Vladimir Putin is calling on the conservatives of the world to unite—behind him. The Kremlin leader's full-throated defense of Russia's "traditional values" and his derision of the West's "genderless and infertile" liberalism in his annual state-of-the-nation address last week was just the latest example of Putin attempting to place himself at the vanguard of a new "Conservative International."
:::: youtube.com/watch?v=I0fGxujeJb… ::::
The Punk and the Godfather: "You Declared you would be Three Inches Taller..." - 1973
... "Donald Trump doesn’t appear to measure up to Prince William’s 6′ 3″
Photos of Trump standing alongside Prince William Saturday suggest that the incoming president may not be as tall as he has claimed".
::: _____________
"Британские учёные из Cambridge Analytica предложили сделать из 5 тысяч существующих человеческих психотипов - "идеальный образ" возможного сторонника Трампа. Затем.. положить этот образ обратно на всё психотипы и таким образом подобрать универсальный ключик к любому и каждому.", "Как сделать так, чтобы даже люди не говорящие на языке друг друга, могли бы обмениваться информацией быстрее всех, понимать друг друга с полуслова, чувствовать тренды и влиять на их развитие?", "Дальше оставалось только загрузить эти данные в информационные потоки и социальные сети."
Donald Trump doesn't appear to measure up to Prince William's 6' 3"
mross@bayareanewsgroup.com (The Mercury News)don't like this
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ProfessorOwl_PhD [any]
in reply to RoundSparrow @ .ee • • •RoundSparrow @ .ee
in reply to ProfessorOwl_PhD [any] • • •You admit that you do bullshit, as you are doing on Lemmy to me. it isn't unrelated, that's your failure to use associative thinking.
I'm not harassing you, you are a bully who found an autistic person you found to be "weak" and "alone" and I'm commenting that the bully on Lemmy is proud that "we" are "bullshit" in UK. You analyze my behavior, found me to be isolated and weak, and reported to have me shut down, because you sensed my autism spectrum disorder and extreme brain damage caused by Cambridge Analytica psyops.
It isn't irrelevant, you don't grasp or failed to recognize associative thinking. You want a very narrow and controlled use of free Internet social media systems, so you try to shut down what you can't relate to or find challenges to mass mind manipulation by people like Edward Bernays, Vlad Surkov, or entire firms like Cambridge Analytica.
::: _____________
“When making choices, neurotypical people can be very sensitive about how a question or choice is presented or framed. Most people prefer an outcome that is presented in a positive light as opposed to a negative light, even if the two choices are identical.”... “Associative thinkers see relations and connections everywhere and tend not to categorize things. When I hear or read a certain word, I suddenly see a lot of “pictures” in my mind that have something to do with that word. This happens in quite an unstructured and even chaotic way. It's a complicated spiderweb of memories, pictures, and thoughts.” - page 19, Casey "Remrov" Vormer, Connecting With The Autism Spectrum: How To Talk, How To Listen, And Why You Shouldn’t Call It High-Functioning
Russia and the Menace of Unreality
Peter Pomerantsev (The Atlantic)abeorch doesn't like this.
ProfessorOwl_PhD [any]
in reply to RoundSparrow @ .ee • • •RoundSparrow @ .ee
in reply to ProfessorOwl_PhD [any] • • •I don't understand, You admit that you do bullshit, as you are doing on Lemmy to me.
What I see you doing is every time I communicate in public, you want me shut down and to not be able to communicate. That seems your agenda.
ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]
in reply to RoundSparrow @ .ee • • •RoundSparrow @ .ee
in reply to ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them] • • •How is that? can you show that they are popular top hits? Is there a ranking somewhere, a top 40 of the week? Or do you just make 5-word Twitter-length replies on social systems like Twitter users do / Elon Musk fanaticism that everyone copies in April 2025 as discourse?
I find the All-time Botposting Greatest Hits to be "LOL", "you dumb", "you stupid", "you idiot", "everyone else is idiots", "Donald Trump orange skin", "Donald Trump poopy diapers", shit like that.
I don't actually believe there are that many "bots" as much as people crave very repetitive hate others messages like you see on Rupert Murdoch's media systems, Fox News and such. What seems removed or absent entirely is messages like: "We need more preachers like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr", or "We should all listen to Malala more, she has good ideas!", those seem to be the lowest-performing messages or have been outright deleted by moderators or something. Far more common to see "go kill those you disagree with" messages as All Time Top Hits for comment sections.
::: ____________
“Social media, that little narcissism machine, the easiest way we have ever had to place ourselves on a pedestal of vanity, also is the mechanism that most efficiently breaks you up.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, 2019
yet_another_commie
in reply to dwazou • • •don't like this
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