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?!

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[–] killeronthecorner@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (6 children)

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.

[–] tiramichu@lemm.ee 11 points 1 day ago (5 children)

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.

[–] Horse@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 1 day ago

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?

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