Obamacare Website Violates Licensing Agreement for Copyrighted Software

Weekly Standard ^ | October 17, 2013 | JERYL BIER

[MeshugeMikey]

Company to pursue action against HHS for using copyrighted web script.

Healthcare.gov, the federal government's Obamacare website, has been under heavy criticism from friend and foe alike during its first two weeks of open enrollment. Repeated errors and delays have prevented many users from even establishing an account, and outside web designers have roundly panned the structure and coding of the site as amateurish and sloppy. The latest indication of the haphazard way in which Healthcare.gov was developed is the uncredited use of a copyrighted web script for a data function used by the site, a violation of the licensing agreement for the software.

[tanknetter]

More likely the IVV team at HHS ran a Black Duck scan on the code, and someone leaked the results.

[MeshugeMikey]

perhaps this is part of the reason for the soon departure of this guy???

[MeshugeMikey]

no matter the size of the problem...Our Current Government is incapable of solving it

“Large or Small...we cant handle JACK”

[MeshugeMikey]

hey thats Obamas Kansas Cousin....

[SueRae]

My former employer had several policies on FOSS. These were maintained, reviewed, updated and disseminated regularly.

Some of these involved in HHS.gov are idiots. Can you say ‘infringement’? Any idea how long that takes to resolve through a court system, not to mention the $$$ involved?

[MeshugeMikey]

it will take YEARS

with the court systems backing up as we speak...its only bound to get worse it may take decades.

lets hear it for the regime...

neener neener neener

[Lmo56]

As somebody who’s been doing software QA for a living for 9 years now (and did mainframe development for 17 years before that), it’s fascinating to watch the technical aspects of this website trainwreck. It’s clear to me that the entire project was managed about like you’d expect a government project to be managed and that either there was no time for testing, the testers were incredibly slipshod, or the testers were ignored. The code is apparently incredibly inefficient when it even works at all, and I’m not surprised one bit that they’d steal some copyrighted code bits and slam them in there.

I have VAST experience in UA testing - when I worked for MCI many moons ago, I had to design a software platform for my department.

After formulating the user requirements, I hired a good contracting firm to write the code - things were going great and my UA testing went VERY well. Thats when things went south.

The MCI MIS department got jealous of the progress we were making and got my contracters fired - they then took over the project. BIG MISTAKE !!!

Lousy code, missing user requirements, NO beta testing - and everytime I came up with a bug [which was often], MIS tried to claim it was a feature ...

[barmag25]

In still wondering when they will start to blame website problems on republican sabotage?

[tsowellfan]

Wow, MeshugeMikey! I like that gif! Be careful or Obama will be hunting you down to use your expertise to fix his website :)

[Huskerfan44]

Shut it down, immediately.

[Nifster]

Now if we could just get the whole rest of the crew to resign too

[Huskerfan44]

Likely bath house activities.

[Huskerfan44]

Likely bath house activities.

[Rock N Jones]

Well now AARP’s bed partner United Healthcare is warning that 2014 may not meet expectation because of Obamacare cuts to its Medicare business that is caused by the loss of Medicare Advantage plan’s revenue will not be covered by the company’s medicare supplemental business. AARP receives royaties from United Health Care and AARP has been accused of supporting Obamacare’s cutting out Medicare Advantage plans to thinking that Medigap type plans get them much more mucho bucks. Obamacare stinks so bad that even AARP can’t get it right!
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/unitedhealth-membership-increases-third-quarter-102922064.html
http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/2012/09/22/the-aarps-2-8-billion-reasons-for-supporting-obamacares-cuts-to-medicare/

Just a thought:
“God looks down from heaven to see if there is anyone that understands, that seek God,
They have all turned aside, They have together become filty,
There is no one that does good, no not one”

Well?

[Huskerfan44]

Stand by for another executive order!

[Huskerfan44]

Yup
Bush did it

[savedbygrace]

This is the correct link:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obamacare-website-violates-licensing-agreement-copyrighted-software_763666.html

[Myrddin]

I'll bet the code is riddled with licensing violations. Get a good intellectual property attorney to get an injunction filed to cease and desist further use of the site until the software has been inspected and any violations litigated to the satisfaction of the parties whose rights have been infringed.

[Pollster1]

What kind of moron company announces that their software is associated with the ObamaCare website fiasco? I would completely ignore the infringement just to avoid tainting my reputation by associating it with this colossal failure.

[Windflier]

There’s a public service announcement that runs on the radio in my market, talking about the terrible crime of software piracy in the workplace.

At the end of the ad they give out a government 800 number (that’s a snitch line for those in Rio Linda) to turn in violators at your place of work.

Hmmm......