valimised / evalimine Goto Github PK

It's hard to imagine, what is the goal of not allowing derivative works.

If the goal is to discourage malicious server installations, license is no means to stop that. Only thing that I can imagine, is that benevolent derivations are not welcome for some reason. Why?

From press coverage in Estonian media [1] we can read that publishing the code is supposed to create basis for more widespread use of e-voting ("loob aluse e-hääletamise senisest laiemaks kasutamiseks"). As far as I can understand, disallowing publishing derivative code doesn't accord with that sentiment.

Why doesn't the restriction to non-commercial use suffice?

[1] http://www.postimees.ee/1297368/e-haaletamise-tarkvara-lahtekood-sai-avalikuks

Before anyone can contribute you should clarify some details about this repo. At first the licensing issue mentioned in #1 and #2, why would anyone contribute under such shady terms given by the CC license? If I fork the repo and make changes to it, I'm already violating the license, since my fork is a forbidden derivative.

Secondly, is this an active repo, the so called "master" branch, where the actual development is being made or is it just a dump from you own svn? Will the code stay as it is, or will you update it even if this is only a mirror repo, not the master?

Is this repo going to be maintained, is anyone ever going to read and reply to this issue ticket or not?

If the license is a small tööõnnetus and will be replaced with GPL (or better yet, with MIT/BSD) and you are actually going to maintain the repo, then welcome to the open source development community. I'm sure a lot of people would love to help you out with the code, whic currently does not look very good (no tests, no docs, no code comments, no nothing - and thus, not very trustworthy).

If the repo is going to stay as it is, then I don't see any point of releasing it at all. Noone can't contribute (forking and modifying, which is needed for contribution is prohibited), no one can understand (there's no docs) and no one can trust it (there is no tests).

By now the license doesn't guarantee that the code published here will also be used in servers during the elections. However, this is the most essential thing. Of course there could be other guarantees for that, but willingness to meet all relevant legal criteria would help to gain trust for the process.

The most obvious candidate for license guaranteeing that would be AGPL [1]. As far as I understand, this is the license that you should use for open source code which runs public services on Internet. If you fail to publish the code along with the service, you will be conveniently sued by the Free Software Foundation.

Showing that Election Committee is ready to take that risk would be a reasonable legal guarantee for the people that the actual code used during the elections is not modified for some partisan interest.

Of course using AGPL would require solving issues #1, #2, #3 too, but I think it's all worth it.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html

Hello,

I work with a European R & D institute, and may be interested in this code. While the idea of FOSS-ing your software is great, Estonian comments in the source code are an absolute no-go. This is going to put people off. Please translate to English !!

From CC wiki:

Can I apply a Creative Commons license to software?

We do not recommend it. Creative Commons licenses should not be used for software. We strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available.

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Can_I_apply_a_Creative_Commons_license_to_software.3F

It would be nice to have a gravatar for https://github.com/vvk-ehk so that it can be shared nicely on pages that link to government entities using github

This is a great step in the right direction and I sincerely would like to thank you so much for sharing the server side of the code.

Unfortunately, it came to my attention that product lacks a very important and useful "election rigging" feature. I'm afraid without an easy-to-use rigging mechanism this great project will be useless for most of the countries on this planet.

For that reason, I strongly like to suggest adding a VALIMISTE_TAGLASE (ELECTION_RIGGING according to Google Translate) setting. I also suggest making its default setting True for other government's convenience . Otherwise, IMHO, they are going to fork the project and try to implement their own wheel which is not a good thing at all. Fragmentation is one of the worst things that can happen to the free software scene.

P.S: Here is a quick (Google search)[https://www.google.com/search?q=election+rigging] link to prove its necessity to you

Somewhat related to #14. I think the voting system should have at least some basic integration tests.

I believe a voting system should have some kind of static code analysis to avoid/catch common programming errors/bugs/security issues. Does evalimine have this? Couldn't find anything.

I was searching for a english documentation of the project as I dont know the language in which the documentation is written:(
can anybody help me of getting the documentation in english?

Because of the security implications of this type of software, signed tags should be used to verify the source of the released software.

You'll want to use a GPG key with strong transitive trust from a key published on an Estonian government website.

I would highly recommend avoid using Estonian language in:

1. Comments
2. Function names
3. Variable names
4. Log outputs

As release was open-sourced and highly advertised, many people just can't read code as they do not understand that language.

Problem

When coming to this repository we have no idea about how to install it, test it, what is in the repository, what the license is and who the authors are

Solution

Write a README.md file which points out everything needed so that we can reuse the system in other governments, or set-up a test server to find issues with it.

To whom it may concern,

There doesn't seem to be any unit tests in the code base. I believe something as legally binding as a voting system should have at least some unit tests. The benefits of unit tests far outweigh the costs. So, I hope this request is taken into consideration.

Thank you.