The Spanish Police, Spanish Mint and Portugal's Agency for Administrative Modernisation have been heckled by developers of OpenSC, open source software for smart cards. The developers found that the public administrations use their software libraries, but have not made available this open source code, one of the terms of their licence.
The Portuguese Agency for Administrative Modernisation corrected the error last week, the open source developers report.
According to one of them, Martin Paljak, the Portuguese agency had overlooked the emails sent by OpenSC at first. "A few weeks ago we tried again, and then they replied and began fixing the mistake."
Six days ago, the Agency in Lisbon added a link to the OpenSc libraries in their technical manual on the website of the Cartão de Cidadão, Citizen Card. The chip in this identity card can be used by citizens to identify themselves electronically and to authenticate electronic documents.
Emails sent to the Spanish public administrations over the past weeks remained unanswered. The developers in vain tried to contact the Spanish organisations by phone earlier this week and have now asked a Spanish lawyer to help resolve the issue.
"We do not want to discredit either of the two Spanish agencies, but would like to be able to support the card in the original OpenSC implementation", explains OpenSC developer Paljak. "If the Spanish administrations work with the development community, it will make their applications better and safer. And their publishing the OpenSc code can not in any way compromise their applications."
The Spanish police did not respond to phone calls and emails requesting comments.
More information:
OpenSC's report on the Spanish Police and Spanish Mint
OpenSC's report on Portugal's Agency for Administrative Modernisation