Revoked Helthcare.gov Open Source Code

One of the things that I have been following for a bit is the Healthcare.gov source code that was posted to github. This was posted by the developers of healthcare.gov who had this statement on their website for a fiew months untill it was changed some time this week.

As you can see that is not what is on there now.

There has been some rumors circulating that because of the goverment being down they took it down from github.com because no one was working on it. There has also been talk that people have spammed the bug reporter with angry messages with why the government is not working. But if that was true why didn't they just close the bug tracker instead of closing the whole project. The interesting part is they have been so good at distributing information on what they are doing that its a mystery on why they would have stopped communication all together. Who knows it could now just be a private repo that only a selected few now have access to.

But back to the code its insisting on having an almost transparent view at the development process for this site and being able to provide input and actually change the source code (as long as they accept the changes).

On some of the other places people have made bug reports for the government with some really funny comments that Can be seen here. There is funny programer logic like I can "confirm that this is reproducible. Have you tried rebooting it?", "expecting to see this one closed with WONTFIX", "Looks like we've been patching the original source for 200+ years. Maybe rewrite to take advantage of modern off-the-shelf solutions?".

But back to the original point the government being down will have a multitude of consequences that people will not know about for a long time after we finally start back up. Even though I am not a fan of our government there are still things that I like about it and would like to keep.