Healthcare.Gov Fixes Copyright Violation From Open-Source Code

The U.S. government, specifically the Obama administration, has come under fire for faults in the Healthcare.gov website. One of the lesser known issues is a simple copyright violation based on an open-source piece of code.

According to an official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the error was not intentional and has been corrected.

A recent report by outside investigators found that part of the code used to build Healthcare.gov was taken from another project without proper use.

The code required a copyright header that linked back to its creator, but the officials who built Healthcare.gov failed to include that copyright notice. It is essentially the equivalent of writing a high school research paper and forgetting to cite a source.

Healthcare.gov has been visited more than 20 million times since it launched on October 1 and it has been plagued by issues since it launched. However, the source code copyright issue was not affecting the sites ability to perform.

The open-source code was lifted from British company called Sprymedia. In releasing its open source code, Sprymedia said copyright notices must be kept inside any software for which its code was used.

Examining the Healthcare.gov source code showed the absence of that code. Here’s a screenshot of the code, as written by Sprymedia:

And here is the code as displayed on Healthcare.gov, as captured a few days ago by the Way Back Machine:

Interestingly enough, critics have complained that Healthcare.gov is not an open-source platform. If it was open-source, programmers could potentially help solve problems that have caused headaches for millions of Americans.

The “stolen” Healthcare.gov code was fixed with proper accreditation by Thursday morning. Officials have not commented further on the use of open-source code for the platform.

Do you think officials for Healthcare.gov were trying to pull a fast one or simply forgot to include the codes proper copyright credits?