Linux Takes Over E-Voting In Australian State

daria42 writes "The Electoral Commission in the Australian state of Victoria has made plans to expand its use of electronic voting kiosks based on Linux in the next state election in November of this year. But it appears to be a little confused: the documentation states it will be using the '2.6 kernel/Gentoo release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.' Huh?"

Comments

Re:What about the rest of it?

[erroneus]

Are you seriously asking someone to RTFA for you and tell you what it says?

Seriously, I think some people are seriously confused about Linux and programming. The problem with voting machines isn't whether they run Linux or Windows (though it is a problem of cost of the OS) it's whether or not the source code to the processes is open and available and the ability to verify that the binary running is in fact compiled from that same source. If this happened in a Windows based machine, there would be fewer concerns. However, one thing is generally true -- when people code for a Linux platform, they almost always consider freeing the source code and when coding for Windows, they almost always expect to keep the source code private.

This is how things like "The internet is a series of tubes" gets started. Someone was trying to explain something conceptually and the recipient tried to take it literally.