DHHS hijacked freeware to make Healthcare.gov

[Forever_frost]

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.

The script in question is called DataTables, a very long and complex piece of website software used for formatting and presenting data. DataTables was developed by a British company called SpryMedia which licenses the open-source software freely to anyone who complies with the licensing agreement. A note at the bottom of the DataTables.net website says: "DataTables designed and created by SpryMedia © 2008-2013." The company explains the license for using the software on that website [emphasis added]:

DataTables is free, open source software that you can download and use for whatever purpose you wish, on any and as many sites you want. It is free for you to use! DataTables is available under two licenses: GPL v2 license or a BSD (3-point) license, with which you must comply (to do this, basically keep the copyright notices in the software).
The software, a version of which is available at DataTables.net, contains the copyright notice in the opening lines of the code:



At the Healthcare.gov website, however, the opening lines of the script appear as follows, with the copyright and all references to the author and SpryMedia deleted; a search of the entire script does not turn up the missing lines either:



Even a cursory comparison of the two scripts removes any doubt that the source for the script used at Healthcare.gov is indeed the SpryMedia script. The Healthcare.gov version even retained easily identifiable comments by the script's author, such as the following:

Here is a screen capture from the SpryMedia script:



Here is the same section at Healthcare.gov:



THE WEEKLY STANDARD contacted SpryMedia for comment. A representative for the company said that they were "extremely disappointed" to see the copyright information missing and will be pursuing it further with the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that runs the Healthcare.gov site.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obamacare-website-violates-licensing-agreement-copyrighted-software_763666.html

[Nash B.]

Rookies

[CexMashean]

[line-em-up]

That is not suprising. I work with multiple people that are incompetent, but take credit for others' work. One example. The guy that replaced me is still using the computer image I built before I left 2 years ago and he still uses it claims it as his own. It's no big deal, really. It just makes me chuckle everytime I hear him crow about it like it's a big deal.

Oh, and he a liberal Obummer supporter too.

[Forever_frost]

http://washingtonexaminer.com/troubled-obamacare-website-wasnt-tested-until-a-week-before-launch/article/2537381

Federal officials did not permit testing of the Obamacare healthcare.gov website or issue final system requirements until four to six days before its Oct. 1 launch, according to an individual with direct knowledge of the project.

The individual, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described the troubled Obamacare website project as suffering from top-level management disarray, changing systems requirements and recurring delays.

The root cause of the problems was a pivotal decision by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services officials to act as systems integrator, the central coordinator for the entire program. Usually this role is reserved for the prime information technology contractor.

As a result, full testing of the site was delayed until four to six days before the fateful Oct. 1 launch of the health care exchanges, the individual said.

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Federal officials were “freezing requirements in time to permit full testing at all levels of the site — integration testing, user testing, performance testing and tuning,” the individual said.

“Normally a system this size would need 4-6 months of testing and performance tuning, not 4-6 days,” the individual said.

The source said there were “ever-changing, conflicting and exceedingly late project directions. The actual system requirements for Oct. 1 were changing up until the week before,” the individual said.

The individual described the project as suffering from a “lack of an end-to-end business and technology vision for the project,” adding that “the hardest part of any technology project is not the technology — it is the business process decisions, what is the system supposed to do and how it will it do it.”

In addition, “The challenge with this project was that the decisions were made very, very late in the project, and no one organization ... seemed to know how this complex ecosystem of applications, interfaces, user processes and hardware should all work together.”

Another person, a former employee of CGI Federal — the private-sector contractor hired to build healthcare.gov — said the government’s insistence on being the systems integrator resulted in disastrous consequences for the website.

The former employee said that “requirements came late, CMS dictated the design, especially the sign-up-before-viewing-plans, and there was absolutely not enough time for testing.”

Another former CMS contract employee who also requested anonymity said, “CMS was not capable of being the integrator. ... An integrator used to be someone like an IBM. That is how this business used to be run. CMS is not an integrator. CMS operates as numerous disparate organizations. I often recommended we get a good, strong integrator like an IBM to look at the entire mess.

“I wonder why the president did not have better technical advisers. He ran a huge risk with this,” the former contract employee said.

Stan Z. Soloway, president and CEO of the trade association that represents hundreds of government service companies, reviewed major contracts in the project and concluded that CMS was the system integrator. He has no direct connection to the healthcare.gov project.

“The system integration piece is an important one because that’s where it all comes together. And I don’t see any evidence in any of any of those contracts that says 'system integration' or overall management. So that leads me to believe that CMS — as others have said they did — chose to do the integration of the system of themselves.”

Soloway also said one of the main reasons a government agency seeks to be a systems integrator is for control. “On one level, government wants to be careful to how much responsibility it turns over to one entity, how much control,” he said.

Soloway heads the Professional Services Council, which represents 370 private-sector companies that provide technical services to the federal government. Among his member companies is CGI Federal, the prime contractor that designed and operates healthcare.gov. CGI Federal is the U.S. subsidiary of CGI Group, based in Montreal, Canada.

“One has to look at, did CMS have the right kinds of skills, organizational structure, alignments internally? What were the other technology elements? And were they properly knit together?” Soloway asked.

CMS spokesmen refused to say if their agency was the systems integrator.

Other IT experts said it is highly unusual for a government agency to act as a systems integrator. “Literally, it’s crazy,” said IT consultant Charles Martin. “The reason government goes to external prime contractors to do integration is because they [government] know they’re no good at it.”

Martin has been an IT consultant to the U.S. Defense Department, the IRS and the Commerce Department.

“I don't recall ever hearing that HHS was notably good at running big IT projects,” he said, referring to the Department of Health and Human Services, the parent agency of both the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and much of the Obamacare infrastructure. “The government generally doesn't do big IT projects. It hires somebody else.”

Patrick Ruffini, a digital expert with extensive experience on information technology for Republican presidential campaigns, agreed, saying, “From what I understand, usually you do have a private-sector systems integrator just because there isn’t that level of technical expertise in the government, typically speaking.”

Soloway, however, said some of the military services have been technical integrators on weapons systems, particularly the Air Force. But he said even the military typically farms out IT integration.

“There is always the question, ‘Do you have the capability internally and skill sets, the people with the right depth to do the systems engineering and program management associated with something this complicated?' That’s a question,” Soloway said.

[helosailor]

It is inconceiveable that the U.S. Government could screw up something so simple







Said no one, ever.

[STANGGT40]

They should've just hired Abecx!

[bird_dog0347]

Like most other businesses, IT is seen as a liability or a "cost", not an asset or income producing portion of the business. This sounds like a classic case of too many Chiefs, not enough Indians.

[Nash B.]

I haven't read that much about integration since my last semester of calculus in college.

[mikeb]

This sounds like a classic case of too many Chiefs, not enough Indians.

There is that - plus the element of government officials trying to exert control for their own political purposes, sticking fingers into the requirements and demanding changes way past the time when all of that should have been frozen.

There is also the element of apparently skipping the design work and trying to code straight from the requirements. That's akin to starting construction on a house with no blueprints, only knowing that a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house is the final goal.

Who knows whether or not the developers were competent? My bet is that the work got shipped off to the cheapest offshore bidder.

The result? Total chaos. And they knew it too which is why testing started so late and people were not allowed to see the mess that had been created until the last minute.

Companies like IBM or EDS come with their own baggage/problems but they do have experience with huge projects like this and can usually make them work given enough time and money. Especially money LOL.....

[The King]

Someone on NPR reported this morning that Republicans were to blame because they blocked funding that would allowed for adequate testing prior to getting the site up and running. Do tell...

[ceyko]

Design? Pfft....ain't nobody got time for that.

[racrguy]

Like most other businesses, IT is seen as a liability or a "cost", not an asset or income producing portion of the business. This sounds like a classic case of too many Chiefs, not enough Indians.

A buddy of mines old lady is programming a site for the government (not obamacare) and from the way she describes it, too many chiefs is exactly the case. That and the client has no idea what they want so it makes it very difficult I program for them.

[stevo]

Someone on NPR reported this morning that Republicans were to blame because they blocked funding that would allowed for adequate testing prior to getting the site up and running. Do tell...

I heard a guy actually blame Republicans for 0bamacare on the premise that if they would have had a better presidential candidate, 0bama would have never been elected. I thought the guy was being sarcastic, but he was serious. Yes, he is a liberal.

Stevo

[YALE]

A buddy of mines old lady is programming a site for the government (not obamacare) and from the way she describes it, too many chiefs is exactly the case. That and the client has no idea what they want so it makes it very difficult I program for them.

Lolz. You could've just said, "Yale's old lady." The place she works for is a subcontractor for the company that got the bid, and they really have no idea what they're doing. The really funny thing is, every other programmer involved has a PhD in either computer science, or math, and she's worlds ahead of them in terms of output. She has basically worked herself out of a job, and they're making her teach herself sysadmin shit, because the guy that they originally asked to do it isn't competent, and the guy building the other half of the program isn't even close to done.