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NHS Goes To War Against Open Source
Quoting: NHS Goes To War Against Open Source —
Throughout my time working for the UK Government - in GDS, NHSX, i.AI, and others - I championed Open Source. I spoke to dozens of departments about it, wrote guidance still in use today, and briefed Ministers on why it was so important.
That's why I'm beyond disappointed at recent moves from NHS England to backtrack on all the previous commitments they've made about the value of open source to the UK's health service.
It's rare that multiple people leak the same story to me, but that's what gives me confidence that lots of people within the NHS are aghast at this news.
A few days ago, I was sent this quote which was attributed to a senior technical person in NHS England.
We are obviously looking at things like Mythos, which is more sophisticated at finding vulnerabilities. In the next week or so, we will be changing our tack on coding the open and making our code public until we're on top of that risk.
Most of our repos, unless they're essential, will be removed for security reasons.
Also:
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Eden: NHS goes to war against open source
Terence Eden reports that the UK's National Health Service (NHS) is preparing to close almost all of its open-source repositories as a response to LLM tools, such as Anthropic's Mythos, becoming more sophisticated at finding security vulnerabilities. He does not, to put it mildly, agree with the decision...
More here:
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NHS England rushes to hide software over AI hacking fears – Dan Q
Yet again, “AI” is the reason why we can’t have nice things on an open and transparent Web.
This is bad, of course. But the worst part is the illusion it helps feed that closed-source software is necessarily more-secure than open-source software. Obviously it’s all much more-complex than that. Indeed, the article goes on to quote Terence Eden thoroughly debunking the entire line of thought: [...]