Monthly Archives: October 2013

…the hope that Congress will recognize a “moral obligation”…

This article is also cross-posted to my intelink blog.


Part of the Antideficiency Act (codified at 31 U.S.C. § 1342) reads as follows:

An officer or employee of the United States Government or of the District of Columbia government may not accept voluntary services for either government or employ personal services exceeding that authorized by law except for emergencies involving the safety of human life or the protection of property. . . .

I have heard this admonition at various times in the context of Open Source Software: if the government cannot accept “voluntary services”, then presumably it cannot allow people to volunteer to write open-source software for the government. Maybe it can’t even use open source software, since it was either written by volunteers or at least licensed for use voluntarily…?

These concerns are, of course, completely wrong, as I will endeavor to show:
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my reverse-proxy

UPDATE: There is a followup to this post.

Various people have asked me about my reverse proxy server, which I alluded to previously.  I’ve used Apache mod_proxy, and perlbal, but now I do it with a 50-odd SLOC node.js program, which leans heavily on node-http-proxy.  It’s too ad-hoc to be worth posting to GitHub, but its possibly worth describing for any other node.js types out there.
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