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?!
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
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:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/mar/26/david-cameron-private-dinners-tory-donors
Boris Johnson was also caught selling access to Downing Street in exchange of money:
https://www.ft.com/content/8c6041ff-a223-43e9-9e45-53c3f7cf47f7
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.
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.
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.)
@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.
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!
@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
The vendor will absolutely take that custom code and use it to extract maximum profit from a different customer. I’ve experienced it from both sides of the transaction. Open source at least allows the functionality to be “developed” only once.
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.
It doesn’t even have to be offshore accounts. Just a fat long-term maintenance contract would be enough to hide a lot of corrupt costs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
isn’t that how you get a tech cult?
like ComStar or the Cult Mechanicus?
