An OSDV Election Night Gift: The Pugent Smell of Freshly Cut Code!

Greetings Friends & Supporters of the OSDV Project-

This may be one of the most significant announcements to date in the history of the OSDV Foundation.  

On this election evening of November 2008, I take pleasure in announcing onbehalf of our CTO, John Sebes, and a core team of contributing developers (to be more properly recognized and applauded shortly), the OSDV Project has just released the first piece of prototype open source digital voting code to the world to start examining, commenting, wrangling, and improving.

Introducing the first existence of OASES.

Although arguably trivial compared to some coding efforts in the open source world, nevertheless this is an accomplishment which you can learn about here.

So, just what is this prototype, and what does it demonstrate?

This prototype represents the important but easier first step towards SHARP - a minimal OS along with other components (mainly a minimized Python execution environment) that compriss a platform for the software of OASES, which is the OSDV Project's voting system.

It is available as source code and as a downloadable LiveCD boot image that you can use to run a demo on your own standard PC hardware.

The download is in two forms. 
First, a demonstration system is available as a a LiveCD system image that you can download as an ISO file, burn to a boot disk, and use the disk to run the demo system on your standard PC hardware.

Second, the adventurous can download the source and build the ISO on your own.  Why "adventurous?"  Well, because this is a pre-release, your-on-your-own pre-Alpha, non-distribution (you get the point) that's being actively worked on (likely as you read this), until a stable release is ready. But that's no reason not to dare to some code wrangling!

To be sure this is a small step.  But with equal sure footing I can submit that this is an important small first step.  You can learn more, and I encourage you to get involved on our Wiki.

And geesh, there is so much more to talk about going on behind hte scenes in terms of more code work, impending finanical support, growthin the movement, I don't know where to start, except to note that some things aren't fully baked yet, so I ask your paitence while we nail it down before we start blogging about it. :-)

In the mean time, I return to monitoring the vote across the country.
Cheers
Gregory