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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!"
The GOP announced that it's adopting a 100% Microsoft platform for all of its future projects. A senior official was quoted as saying "Free? Nothing that's good is free! After all, Ballmer said that WinXP is the most secure Windows OS ever!"
ok, so it's flamebait...just laugh and move on
I, for one, welcome our new redneck Dean Overlords!
I think GNU/RMS assumed HE would be a GNU/US Presidential candidate at this point.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
The internet "as we know it" is not necessarily a good thing. Arpanet was around however before Gore entered congress in 1977. Therefore The great Goron didn't take the initiative to create anything. He may have championed commercializing it and bringing about the dot-boom/bomb fiasco, but taking initiative he didn't.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Was Dean just as "geek friendly" when the campaign spammed users back in August?
Dean is going after low-hanging fruit. Go up to your average voter and mention that Dean released software under the GPL. Go ahead. After you get the brook-trout stare, consider the much-ballyhooed blogs of these candidates. High-tech tools to preach to the choir.
Great for shoring up the base, maybe a little grass-roots organization. Then throw in Clark or someone who actually affects the campaign on more than window-dressing geek issues and see how irrelevant it all becomes.
An insightful opinion piece by CK Rairden, which can be found here, makes an important point. Howard Dean is loved by the most far-left winged Democrats, who would do anything to see Bush out of office. However, it is exactly this attitude that would guarantee failure for the Democrat Party should Howard Dean win the party's nomination, as it would ensure a second Bush term as President.
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
He's just doing it to get some votes. If M$ came along and offered him money, he'd say Windows is great, too. This guy is a politician, first and foremost. Let's not get carried away.
I don't think Bush would kill US citizens to win elections.
I agree -- that's a democratic tactic: Hope for the Iraq mission to go south to hurt the President's popularity. There were confessions of this nature by liberal columnists following the first phase of the war.