The failures of Healthcare.gov to launch properly have many parents and there are several ideas floating around to fix it. One of the most common is the idea of running government projects as open source projects; putting the code on github or some other open site and encouraging people to look at it. As Paul Ford says:
Companies such as Google (GOOG), Amazon.com (AMZN), Twitter, and Facebook (FB) all think in terms of platforms talking to applications. They deploy lots of small teams that are expected to ship new features and fixes all the time—sometimes daily. Like anything that involves human beings, shipping code can devolve into squabbling, missed deadlines, and flawed releases. The programming community’s key realization is that the solution to these problems is to create more transparency, not less: code reviews, tons of “unit tests” to automatically find flaws, scheduled stand-up meetings, and the constant pushing of new code into the open, where it’s used by real people. To cite just one example, developers at the giant online marketplace Etsy are encouraged to release code to the world on their first day of work.
Government IT can’t work in such a transparent way. Or could it? There’s a whole set of tools, methods, and processes already set up and ready to use, all embodied in the culture of open-source software development. The U.S. federal government, led by the executive branch, should make all taxpayer-funded software development open-sourced by default. In the short run, this would help to prevent the recurrence of problems like those that plague healthcare.gov. Longer term, it will lead to better, more secure software and could allow the government to deliver a range of services more effectively. And it would enrich democracy to boot.
All of this is logical, sound, makes perfect sense will almost certainly never happen. Why? Partisanship. As Ford himself points out:
And the Republican leadership has wasted no time making hay: Senator Lamar Alexander and Representative Darrell Issa sent a letter to Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services, demanding answers to a list of strongly worded, highly technical—and fair—questions. Speaker of the House John Boehner has called the rollout a “train wreck”; Senator Pat Roberts has called for Sebelius to resign. We are witnessing the beginnings of the single most exhausting, hellish code review in software development history.
Now, imagine that the core code for Healthcare.gov was open sourced. Putting aside malicious attempted changes to the code (and please don't tell me there wouldn't be. We just spent two weeks and 24 billion dollars of economic damage in a government shutdown designed to defund Obamacare. People have been told that it is socialism, the end of freedom and contains death panels. Of course there would be malicious code changes attempted.), imagine what politicians will do with the bugs discovered. Every found security flaw suddenly becomes trumpeted from every right wing news source in the universe. The number of discovered bugs becomes a talking point used over and over. The presence of any unclosed bugs, no matter how trivial, becomes evidence of terrible government workmanship and a sign that the site is going to steal your identity and sell it to Al Qaeda. Good luck to the poor people who have to explain software development concepts to non-developers on the Sunday talk shows. By the time the site launched, people would "know" it was a broken disaster that guarantees your personal information will be swiped by all the hackers who have had access to the source code from the start.
No, while open sourcing government could can and has led to good results, open sourcing high-profile, controversial projects is most likely to lead the normal software development process being used as a weapon by the project's enemies to smite it.