healthcare.gov software piracy

[+OverSword]

According to our own government, software piracy is a serious offense. I mean, you can go to prison, right? Well according to the following article the software used on the obamacare web site was ilegaly pirated from a Britsh software company.

The headline in the article does not help the story because the headline implies that the Obama administration pirated the software. That is obviously not true of course. None the less, the site is run with pirated software. Is DHS going to seize the site and shut it down, or is our government goint to blatantly demonstrate that it is above the law, yet again?

From the article:

The Obama administration has been caught red-handed engaged in software piracy. Computer code used on Healthcare.gov was stolen (and then modified in an effort to conceal the theft) from a UK company called Spry Media.

To my best knowledge, this story was broken by WeeklyStandard.com in a blog authored by Jeryl Bier.

The computer code that was stolen is called DataTables, and it is exclusively provided under a GPL v2 license which requires anyone who uses the software code to keep the copyright notice visible in the code itself. This allows the original author of the code to receive attribution for creating it.

An analysis of the code running Healthcare.gov reveals that the Obamacare development team maliciously removed the copyright notice and credit attributions from the code while copying and using the rest of the code. In the field of journalism, this would be called "plagiarism." In the field of computer software, it's called "piracy" according to the U.S. government.

Read more here http://www.naturalnews.com/042564_Obamacare_software_piracy_computer_code.html#

[questionmark]

well, not quite. In the administration there is nobody tech savvy enough to write any type of website. Healthcare.org was contracted to about a half dozen private companies. Of which the claimant to the front end is a company called Development Seed.

I have posted the corresponding stories some time last week but evidently there were no takers.

As for Obama "softwarepirate", well no, if somebody pirated it was one (or more) of the private firms contracted to make the program.

[+OverSword]

well, not quite. In the administration there is nobody tech savvy enough to write any type of website. Healthcare.org was contracted to about a half dozen private companies. Of which the claimant to the front end is a company called Development Seed.

I have posted the corresponding stories some time last week but evidently there were no takers.

As for Obama "softwarepirate", well no, if somebody pirated it was one (or more) of the private firms contracted to make the program.

If you had read what I typed above the pasted part of the article you will see I said "The headline in the article does not help the story because the headline implies that the Obama administration pirated the software. That is obviously not true of course."

[questionmark]

If you had read what I typed above the pasted part of the article you will see I said "The headline in the article does not help the story because the headline implies that the Obama administration pirated the software. That is obviously not true of course."

And because that is bad journalism (in fact I would have even fired an intern for that one) I posted a clarification below.

[Agent0range]

You can't pirate open source code.

[questionmark]

You can't pirate open source code.

No, but you still are required to name the author if he/she so desires... failing to do that violates the copyright, which is what pirating is.

[Agent0range]

Not really pirating. This is known in the developing world as "forking". Pirating is obtaining illegaly.

[Shiloh17]

From the article:

The Obama administration has been caught red-handed engaged in software piracy. Computer code used on Healthcare.gov was stolen (and then modified in an effort to conceal the theft) from a UK company called Spry Media.

That highlighted area tells you the true meaning of the article. All we need is a new administration and you can insert a new name.