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Free Software for Politics
kevin lyda writes "The Howard Dean campaign is releasing software for web-based communities under the GNU GPL. The project apparently is based on drupal. See here for more info, and here for the software. Regardless if you're for Dean, against Dean, or you're not an American, it's great to see an American politician on the national level using and promoting free software. I wonder if RMS thought he'd see a U.S. presidential candidate releasing stuff under the GPL when he founded GNU 20 years ago!"
Although I'm politically more with Kucinich, I really admire the way Dean has taken the lead with using novel forms of communications technology. Everything he's done, from meetups to blogging to soliciting individual donations on the internet shows a kind of grasp of the technology that really reflects well on him (or, at least, his staff). The latest news is pretty much in line with that behavior.
It does beg the question--will a Dean presidency be geek friendly? Will it turn back the DMCA and scale back software patents? I'd like to know more, but I'm optimistic for the first time in a long time.
We know that faster-than-light travel is contrary to our current best effort at producing a consistent body of laws to describe nature, but those laws are based on observations accurate within certain parameters and realms. But we certainly can't say what's really dictated by some magical immutable laws of physics.
You know, I like free software as much as the next geek, but as for him "promoting free software"... well, he's not. His campaign staff is...give credit where credit is due. I seriously don't think he knows about this promotion.
It'll be interesting to see if any competing campaigns take it up and use it for their communities.
Said Joe Trippi, the Dean for America campaign manager: "It is extraordinary that our grassroots base is now building tools to support itself. This is grassroots squared." He added: "As far as we know, this is the first open source development project for a presidential campaign, and it's definitely the most ambitious."
O.K., so Dean is smart. This is one of the most impressive grass roots campaigns I have ever seen and he has my vote. Assuming Dean is elected President, given his background, perhaps we could have some open source solutions to the health care crisis to enable physicians and hospitals to reduce costs associated with all of the electronic medical records problems that are cropping up.
The ideal pair? Dean and Clark. A thinker and an individual who gets things done. What a concept!
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
But will he release his gubernatorial papers under GPL? Right now they are closed source. No one has the right to view them. I am more interested in his political history than some software someone else wrote that he is piggybacking on for publicity.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
So he'll probably raise taxes on the wealthier to help the poor, undoing the tax cut that Bush passed that gave massive tax breaks to the very wealthy. After seeing a report recently that said that almost 10% of Americans live on less than $8000 a year, it is hard for me to whine about my high taxes.
I'd much rather have a president who knew what the GPL was and raised my taxes than a president who didn't know the difference between a computer and a calculator, but cut taxes blindly.
Dean has done well so far by tapping online resources and communities. But remember that we haven't even started picking convention delegates yet. Once the primaries and caucuses start, Dean will have to find a way to get to all the voters and caucusers who aren't internet geeks. Maybe he can leverage his existing following into some kind of alternate campaign machine. But it's more likely that he'll just start spending money like any other candidate.
I am so amazed whenever slashdot mentions a candidate, they put it in the context of what technologies they support. Is that the only thing that matters in your lives? What kind of gadgets and software you have?
What about important issues like:
freedom of speech
privacy rights
abortion
Who cares what technology the politician supports? What about their moral character?
It's not (always) a bad thing for a politician to be a dreamer, and I don't read anything into that that Clark thinks FTL travel is easy, or will happen in our lifetimes.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Stay away, Howard. You can't win on Slashdot:
If he comes out against DRM/RIAA etc, his opponents will nail him as anti-business.
If he comes out *for* DRM/RIAA, you guys will nail him as here and generate plenty of juicy quotes for his opponents to use.
Al Gore never claimed to have invented the internet. You have fallen for the right-wing spin machine.
http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh120302.shtml
I'm the best IRC client ever.
Almost but not quite as irrelevant as the brand of Web server the candidate runs. I still think that Bush is going to really regret doing that stupid Top Gun stunt next November. It isn;t the uniform, its the way you wear it.
I see one big issue for the Open Source Community in the next election and it is not promoting open source. The big issue is PATENTS and Dean is at least listening to the right people here - Larry Lessig.
We don't want much here, we just want the USPTO to actually apply in practice the principles that it claims to apply.
Novel should mean novel, do something on the Internet that has been done for 20 years is not novel.
Prior review get rid of the secrecy in the process, all applications to be subject to a one year protest period, same as the Europeans do
You have to invent it there are a ridiculous number of speculative patents filled where the inventor has actually invented nothing. Typical cases are in the genetics field where the first person to sequience a gene often files a patent that claims the use of the gene to solve every imaginable ailment before the 'inventor' knows anything about what the gene does
Anyone care to claim a bigger priority? This is a platform that everyone can agree on from Redmond WA to Cambridge MA.
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That logic, while sound on the surface, is frankly, a disgrace to US politics. It encourages people to vote for someone purely as a defensive measure.
The system works properly if everyone votes for whom they feel is the best candidate. Curbed voting like this puts less qualified, but more well known, candidates in office (probably why Bush is in office in the first place).
While I get where you're going, you're essentially contributing to the demise of independants or third parties. You're saying "It's no use, so don't bother."
You have to have some faith in democracy, even though it doesn't always work right.
Actually this is not excluded by Einstein, just that we have no idea how to do it. The key is the concept of space which is actually mutuable. There are ways that we already know about that can warp space in absolutely infintesimal ways. Could there be a way to do it on a large scale? Possibly. There are serious scientists who consider such problems.
Faster than light travel is certainly a much longer shot than fussion, we know that fussion is possible and the sun provides an existence proof. But faster than light is probably a much easier shot than building a missile defense system that can't be circumvented by the opposition. None of the proposals made so far work and none is capable even in theory of counteracting existing countermeasures such as the UK Chevalene warhead design that is so old it was recently withdrawn from service as obsolete.
What we are seeing here is an example of a classical smear attack. I strongly suspect that the original question was asked for the sole purpose of being able to trash Clark as a loony with an out of context quote. Karl Rove and his smear-team did the exact same thing with Gore last time round, they took a bunch of out of context quotes from Gore's ecology book and used them to claim that Gore was some sort of nut. In fact the prediction Gore made about the possible rise of the hydrogen economy and the decline of the internal combustion engine is far from fruitcake, thats why the Whitehouse included $100 million for H2 power research in the last budget.
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Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
" trash Clark as a loony with an out of context quote"
Clark will do himself in. Most of his statements are outright lies: he is living in a fantasy world. He is like Howard Dean: an incredibly mean liar who wants to make things worse, but unlike Dean he has no political experience, and he comes across as the latest Perot (or worse yet: Admiral Stockdale, Perot's very similar clueless running mate who also had military experience).
As for Gore, it was Gore who claimed that he himself invented the Internet. He didn't need Rove's help for this and other nutty claims (Love Canal, listening to not-yet-written union songs as a child, and all the rest of Gore's Zeligry).
"thats why the Whitehouse included $100 million for H2 power research in the last budget. "
This is just another $100 spent on corporate welfare. Don't you have a problem with this? This is one of those mistakes the Bush administration should not be making.