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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[–] lightnegative@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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