Healthcare.gov should be open source now

@bfeld posted an interesting article suggesting that Healthcare.gov should have used Wordpress as some state sites did. I don’t have a strong opinion on whether Wordpress would have been appropriate, but I do love the call in the article to opensource the entire healthcare.gov project, advanced by a number of people including Fred Wilson.

The Healthcare.gov developers site claims that the source will be available but the link to the github project is dead.

The source should go public now. A), it would attract an incredible number of eyes that would be able to highlight the problems both known and unknown. B) it would attract the best and brightest eyes, better than the government can apply in a “tech surge”. C) there are undoubtedly a number of terrible security and privacy bugs in the code, as there are in any large software project, and they would get highlighted and fixed.

And D), the citizens own this code and it should be available to all of us, because we paid for it.

I’d like to see the states go public with their code as well, especially states like Washington where the exchange is working, everyone could benefit from seeing what works.

There is no reason whatsoever to not do this immediately.

UPDATE: there is already a whitehouse.gov petition at http://wh.gov/lD8bf, go sign it!