U.S. Government Fixes Copyright Violation in Healthcare.gov Code

What's This?

By Fran Berkman2013-10-24 19:01:29 UTC

The U.S. government is fixing a known problem with its online insurance marketplace, Healthcare.gov.

No, the website still isn't working properly for most people who are shopping for insurance, but its administrators updated the site's source code after reports of a copyright violation. An official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees the site, acknowledged the error and said it was not intentional.

See also: 15 Most-Followed Politicians on Twitter

"We are aware of the issue and are working to add the copyright header to the code," the official told Mashable earlier this week.

The issue pertains to the federal website set up under the Affordable Care Act, colloquially known as "Obamacare." Under the new law, people without insurance coverage are supposed to be able to go online and easily shop for the plan that best fits their needs.

That hasn't been the case thus far. The site, which President Barack Obama said has been visited more than 20 million times since its Oct. 1 launch, has been plagued by technical issues from day one.

Most states, 36 in total, rely on the federal version of the website, while the rest have built state-specific marketplaces (California, for instance, has CoveredCa.com).

As for the copyright violation in question, The Weekly Standard, a conservative blog, first reported it on Oct. 17. The government used open-source code written by a British company called Sprymedia but neglected to abide by the licensing agreement for the free software.

Sprymedia summarized the terms of use as; "Basically keep the copyright notices in the software." When the code first appeared on Healthcare.gov, the copyright notices were conspicuously absent.

This is the code as written by Sprymedia:

(Click to enlarge)

Here's the the Healthcare.gov version of the code, as captured Wednesday evening by the Way Back Machine Internet Archive. Notice in the first few lines there is no mention of Sprymedia and its founder Allan Jardine.

(Click to enlarge)

By Thursday morning, however, the error in the code had been rectified. Jardine did not reply to our inquiries regarding this error.

Unfortunately for those looking to purchase a healthcare plan, this update won't do anything to improve the performance of the site, whose shortcomings have come into sharp focus since the end of government shutdown last week. Congress has taken aim at uncovering the cause of the problems while Obama has promised a "tech surge" to fix it.

The chart below shows that, during its first week, only a small fraction of those using the federal website have been able to enroll for plans, as explained in a blog post by web traffic analysis company Compete.

Critics of Healthcare.gov's bumpy launch have also noted that the government has not made its code open source, which would allow programmers to learn from whatever mistakes have been made.

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.

Image: Flickr, Marjan Krebelj

Topics: coding, copyright, healthcare, obamacare, open source, U.S., US & World