I’m not convinced open source would really help. I get the feeling that Mathematica’s underlying philosophy just isn’t a good fit for practical programming.
See my other comments down there. In any case, not every thing everyone does should be open sourced. There are things you just have to hire smart people to do the jobs right and open source does not solve issues immediately.
Genuine question: how would open sourcing help with that compatibility issue? Open source software is nice, but doesn't magically make all compatibility problems go away.
Even open source software is opaque. You can't know that the software is unaltered when it's running on a machine. If that machine does something other than produce and print a paper ballot and provide a preliminary count, I'd say something is wrong. And if a closed-source machine prints the wrong ballot, it's for the voter to verify and object. Open source doesn't change that.
Open source seems to be an argument only if you want to have direct counting without an audit trail. If that's the case, the open source aspect is just obfuscating that the overall system is broken.
Why does the fact it being open source impact a product decision? Especially when that likely doesn't matter in practice, e.g., I doubt owners of the device are contributing to the source frequently, if ever.
Open source == ease of changing it. At least with software, and I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t have the same expectations for open hardware like 3D printers.
I think you underestimate the importance of being open source to a lot of people.. I don’t want to rely on something I can’t debug if we have an issue.
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