Open like yo Moms.

I work for a Marine Insurance Underwriting company. I don’t really feel like going into what our role is, but just know we deal with insurance for boats.

Part of the Patriot Act states that when a policy is being created or is up for renewal, we must check the insured’s name against the OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control), which basically means that if you are Cuban or linked to a terrorist organization, we can’t insure you.

Anyways, as a result of the last AAMGA Open Source round-table discussion (I didn’t attend – how did I miss that?), a new site/forum has been set up primarly for us IT guys in the insurance industry. One company has pretty much spear-headed the initiative, and as soon as I heard about this, I went to the powers-that-be, and told them what I wanted to do.

About a year ago, I wrote a quick little web-based app to download the OFAC database from the US Treasury Dept. and input it into a MySQL database so that my users can search it. Wrote the app in an afternoon, both saving us a bunch of money (by not buying ignorantly priced software) and making us OFAC/Patriot Act compliant.

Over the past few days, I’ve been going back over it as I have time, cleaning it up and prepping it. I registered a project (still pending dammit – hurry up) at sourceforge called openOFAC. As soon as I can, I’ll be uploading my files to the repository and sending the guys over at insuranceITpro.com a link to the app, establishing our company early on as a progressive and open-source friendly company.
The last line of the previous sentence sounded like media spin, didn’t it?

We use the following major open source apps as major backbones of our business, I figured it’s time to give something back: PHP, MySQL, Apache, Gentoo Linux, Samba, openLDAP, openSSL, openSSH, Rsync, openVPN, and Firefox/Thunderbird, just to name a few.