The Weekly Standard reports:
Healthcare.gov, the federal government's Obamacare website, has been under heavy criticism from friend and foe alike during its first two weeks of open enrollment. Repeated errors and delays have prevented many users from even establishing an account, and outside web designers have roundly panned the structure and coding of the site as amateurish and sloppy. The latest indication of the haphazard way in which Healthcare.gov was developed is the uncredited use of a copyrighted web script for a data function used by the site, a violation of the licensing agreement for the software.
Frankly, I'm not surprised. This sort of thing can happen vera, vera easily, especially if you aren't explicitly paying attention to licensing requirements... and even if you are. All it takes is for one person to check in a file (they are using source control, right? Right?!?) with the copyright attribution stripped out, and you have a copyright violation.
Now, this is a relatively minor and easily corrected license violation: add the copyright headers back in. I suspect that the copyright holders would be happy with that and an apology. It does raise the question, though: if someone "sanitized" the code they were using in this instance by removing the copyright attribution, are there any other places where contractors may have cut corners and violated open source or commercial software licenses?
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