Open source means that the community is allowed to fix bugs and contribute to the system.
According to Slate.com, Healthcare.gov is 500 million lines of code, and the problems plaguing the system may necessitate a rewrite of 5 million lines of code. As a software developer who has worked on very large projects, both of these numbers are shocking.
Numbers like that could indicate that the software could benefit from using more reusable parts and libraries developed by the open source community.
Many bugs could be hidden in duplicated code. It's time to put this project on a system like Github and accept pull requests from experienced developers interested in helping on this significant historical undertaking. Healthcare.gov needs to work. Let's make it happen, together.