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FREE is licensed under the General Public License. That means that anyone can get involved and make FREE better! Download the source code and have a play. The current version (1.x) works well, but can be regarded as a proof of concept leaving masses of room for improvement.

The Community

The best way to get involved or just follow what's going on is to subscribe to one of our mailing lists:

Free-dev for nitty gritty developer discussion.
Free-announce for low volume new release anouncements etc.

The simplest thing you could do to show your support is to put a button on your website!

How It Works

Jason Kitcat, that's me, currently holds the patch pumpkin. So if you want a change to go into the next official release, you send it to me and I'll usually put it in. Code should be well commented and e-mail should explain how FREE will benefit from its inclusion.

If your code get's included then your name and e-mail will go into a file called AUTHORS [see latest version] which will be included with every official release.

To Do List

  • Client Interface
    I'd like to see the voting screen to be more flexible, perhaps with rooms for logos from each party as on real ballot sheets.
  • Security
    In a never ending quest, we're always looking to make FREE more secure. Also voter authentication needs to be made more extensible to support biometrics, as in my original specs.
  • Performance
    Any bottlenecks (except your overused modem!), then they need fixing.
  • Election-type customisation
    The European elections, local elections, national elections... they all use different systems such as STV, PR, first-past-the-post etc. How can we support these easily?
  • Improved Automated Setup
    Trying to make it even easier to setup a democracy.
More ideas? Mail me.

Known Bugs

We have migrated our bug system to SourceForge. BUG TRACKING >>>
  • 03-04-2000 Doubled DEV output [Fixed in 1.2.1]
    All DEV (DEBUG level) log outputs are written to the log file twice but are written to the screen normally (i.e. once).
  • 31-03-2000 DBase NULL field error [Fixed in 1.2]
    When ERServer.DBase.checkER( ) was called and the voted field was NULL then the voter authorisation process wouldn't follow the specification but would hang.
  • 22-03-2000 NullPointerException in TCPClient [Fixed in 1.1]
    Certain connection errors in FreeClient.TCPClient and RTServer.TCPClient are throwing exceptions that aren't correctly handled.
  • 20-03-2000 GUI in Solaris [Fixed when buggy JDK was replaced]
    We've encountered some strange Swing exceptions when running FREE in Solaris. The imminent rewrite of all the Swing code should fix this.

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Contact - by Jason Kitcat - j-dom portal

Copyright 2000 FREE e-democracy project.

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