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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!
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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.
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.
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.
You're always free to donate that difference to the charity of your choice, or even to the government if you wish. Don't make that choice for me. I do not happen to agree with you, and don't appreciate you putting your hand in my wallet.
Besides, you are incredibly naive if you think wealth transfer schemes are effective at helping the poor. What they actually do is help some poor, make many more dependent on handouts, and feed the ravenous maw of an enormous, cancerous bureaucracy that dedicates the majority of its resources not to actually helping those in need, but to ensuring its own continued existence.
Private charity is always more efficient than government social programs; private charity lets people feel good about giving instead of resentful that their pocket is being robbed every Friday; private charity enables people to choose methods of giving that are most to their liking.
But, most of all, private charity lets people make their own choices about whether they actually need that extra money at the moment or not, because they are clearly the most informed people about their own needs.
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.
I'd much rather have a president who obeyed his oath to protect and defend the Constitution, and stopped enforcing unconstitutional laws providing for confiscation and redistribution of my wealth to those who didn't earn it.
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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.
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.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
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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.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
But, most of all, private charity lets people make their own choices about whether they actually need that extra money at the moment or not, because they are clearly the most informed people about their own needs.
It doesn't let all people make that choice.
Only those people with lots of money get to make that choice.
If you lived a month as a poor person you'd notice that your "choices" and your "opportunities" are rather more limited than what you've enjoyed to this point in your own life.
Many wealthy people will choose to keep their money rather than give it away. If the proposed changes in the estate tax laws are instituted you can guarantee that a signficantly larger number of wealthy people will exercise their free choice to give money to their own offspring rather than some charity. Count on it.
I prefer equal opportunity for everyone, so that anyone exercising the same hard work and intelligence gets the same pay off. But if you're not lucky enough to be born to the right parents then your "choices" and your "opportunities" are a lot different.
Yes, I earn my money. But it was in a society that provided me with a tax-sponsored public education system and government-guaranteed student loans (which, yes, I did pay back) that would not have existed but for taxes raised by the government.
Yes, wealth transfer schemes like welfare can breed a sick culture of dependence. If there's a good way to cut down on welfare fraud without instituting a bureaucracy, then you ought to let your elected representatives know the solution.
But if you eliminate welfare altogether, you'll start to see more beggars on the street dying from hunger and lack of medical attention. We can live just like they do in Brazil, which has private charities and gangs of five year old abandoned children running around the slums scavenging food.
I am one taxpayer that has benefitted substantially from the recent Bush tax cut and it disgusts me that such a tax cut is instituted at the same time that we're compounding the federal deficit at a record rate.
While the rest of the masses two decades in the future try to pay off the interest on that federal debt, the rich folks like you and me can simply sit back and collect interest on our T-bills. After all, we deserve it.
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