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Welcome to the FREE website. This is the hub for getting involved in improving the first open source system for conducting electronic votes. This is free software released under the General Public License. Why bother? Because some people strongly believe that voting should be non-commercial and non-partisan. See our aims for more on that...

From this site you can download the code and look at the complete documentation.

Of course, if you have any problems with this site or the FREE software, please don't hesitate to e-mail me.


Latest News

14-11-2000 Roll up! Roll up! Get your hot new code... FREE 1.4 has been released and boy, it's got some great new features: The security protocol has been enhance to improve reliability and protect against reverse engineering of the client; general security has also been tightened with strict boundary tests and an upgraded MAC; we've got new verification checks as well as some great bug fixes. So go get it now >>>

31-10-2000 Happy Halloween! The current HSQL database implementation we are using is not Java 1.3 compliant - however due to the greater availability of Java 1.1 we will not be fixing this bug in the forseeable future. This is not a problem for users who have replaced HSQL with JDBC database access to the system of their choice such as MySQL.

05-10-2000 A motley array of buttons and logos are now available for you to put on your website either as a display of support or to indicate where your totally excellent e-Voting system came from. No obligation downloads are here >>>

23-09-2000 The article "Why electronic voting software should be Free Software" has been put online read it now >>>

11-08-2000 Java Network Launcher Protocol (JNLP) support has now been included to allow easy distribution of the FREE client program through a browser. See the JNLP-INSTALL file for more information or see Sun's page. This takes us to version 1.3 of FREE - download it now >>>

20-07-2000 Sorry about the delay in updates - computer problems. Anyway FREE 1.2.2 is now online with 1 major and 1 minor bug fix. More importantly the INSTALL file has been considerably expanded and improved.

29-05-2000 As part of an increased security focus we now offer PGP signatures for our downloads.

27-05-2000 We've updated the documentation, especially Getting Started thanks to feedback from Kevin Mactavish & Songhai Liu at the Western Nevada Community College IS dept.

18-04-2000 We have released FREE 1.2.1 which offers some bug-fixes, log4j 0.8.3, an automated installation system and we now meet GNU release guidelines.

10-04-2000 You can now download FREE 1.2 which provides faster logging, a timeout system for client-side communications and now analyses the results when all totals have been received.

29-03-2000 FREE 1.1 is now available with logging, improved modularisation and some bug fixes.

25-03-2000 The SSL version has been put on hold until further notice due to the need for Java 1.2 with Sun's SSL implementation and expensive certificates in Entrust's SSL API. If you know of alternative ways of doing this please mail me.

24-03-2000 FREE mailing lists have now been setup, we have Free-dev and Free-announce. Subscribe, subscribe, subscribe!

20-03-2000 First public release of FREE is now available! Note SSL version is due in the next week.


Potted History

FREE was developed as part of a joint project at the University of Warwick Department of Computer Science and the Warwick Business School. The project was examining the impact of the Information Revolution on activism and the political process.

One major impact that people have been predicting for years is electronic voting, but during my research it became apparent that all the current implementations were pretty flakey and also commercial. I felt this was an unacceptable state of affairs so I set about making a system that would be useful with today's technology and could be released under the General Public License. FREE is the result.

The project homepage has some more details on my research and also copies of the papers produced as a result of the research.

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Contact - by Jason Kitcat - j-dom portal

Copyright 2000 FREE e-democracy project.

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.