The first release of OpenSTV (then pSTV) was October 20, 2003. Since the beginning, the web site has had a donation box. With the release of OpenSTV 1.5 this past March, I also included a donation request in the header of the election results. For anyone interested in the economics of open-source software, here is a summary of donations received.
From the website donation box, there have been two donations: $250 in December 2007 and $25 in February 2010. Both related to commercial use of OpenSTV. The first was a labor union in Canada, and the second was the popular Q&A site Stack Overflow.
We are releasing a new version of OpenSTV (1.6.1) to fix two bugs:
(1) Some users have had problems installing OpenSTV on Windows
computers, and the Windows installer has been fixed to prevent this
from happening.
(2) When saving a ballot file, OpenSTV would generate an error if the
user didn't include a file extension (e.g., ".blt"). OpenSTV now adds
a .blt extension if the user does not provide one.
Please download the new version from:
http://www.openstv.org/download
A friend of mine pointed me to an interesting article in NewScientist. Here is an excerpt:
- IN AN ideal world, elections should be two things: free and fair. Every adult, with a few sensible exceptions, should be able to vote for a candidate of their choice, and each single vote should be worth the same.
A new version of OpenSTV, version 1.6, is now available for download by using the download link at the top of the page.
New features in this version include:
- Ties can be broken manually in addition to randomly,
- Plugin support for different election report types,
- Allows ballots with duplicate and skipped rankings and ballot IDs, and
- Improvements to speed and usability.
Since about 2001, the website DemoChoice.org has been providing a voter interface system for running elections with instant runoff voting and the single transferable vote. Separately, OpenSTV has been providing a desktop application and vote-counting engine since 2003.
The developers of DemoChoice and OpenSTV have come together to create a joint effort that incorporates the best of both projects. DemoChoice now has a version that uses OpenSTV's vote counting engine at http://openstv.demochoice.org/.
This version of DemoChoice supports most of OpenSTV's counting methods, and allows you to run a complete election, from collecting the votes to displaying the election results.
