Keep things open: it makes things better

Statement

We disagree with the NHS technical leadership’s decision to
hide the source code of all of their repositories.

Making code open source requires more work than keeping it closed.
That hard work is the point.

It requires a higher bar of quality. It requires processes to
proactively find, fix, and monitor for vulnerabilities. It
requires identifying risk, and putting barriers in place to
contain any damage when things go wrong.

But it works like the human immune system: being exposed to
threats hardens the attack surface.

Closed source allows that work to be skipped. It substitutes
obscurity for depth, and obscurity buys you precious little
when a sufficiently motivated attacker is involved.

!

Warning
We call on NHS England to withdraw the SDLC-8 red line and
reaffirm its commitment to the NHS Service Standard Principle
12: “Make new source code open.”

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