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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!"
I wonder if RMS thought he'd see a US presidential candidate releasing stuff under the GPL when he founded GNU 20 years ago!
That's a gnu-candidate thank you.
More candidates should do this. Frankly, I'd be interesting in hearing more about General Clarke's ideas on time travel. (Follow the link... he actually talks about this. I kid you not).
GNU/Howard Dean, then?
Shhhh, don't tell Stallman or we'll never hear the end of it!
There was a call for this before... Slashdot and Dean staff, are you listening?
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
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.
The more significant story is Dean's Internet Principles
a ge name=InternetPrinciples
a ge name=NAN
http://www.deanforamerica.com/site/PageServer?p
and Net Advisory Net, including Lessig
http://www.deanforamerica.com/site/PageServer?p
I submitted this, but it wasn't posted, yet the story about the ridiculous spider case mod was posted. Hmm.
Al Gore invented the Internet but (kinda) lost the elections. Common knowledge.
So 3 years or so from now it migth be common knowledge that Howard Dean invented GNU, the weblog, and Linux too but (kinda) lost the elections. That and his house (to Darl for stealing everything from SCO).
Seriously though, nice initiative but it also smells a bit of, well, I'm sure you get the point.
The great thing about this software is that it could ultimately cut down on the cost of campaigns, lessening the need for big political donors and their influence on politics.
A former employer of mine was involved in developing Web communities for conservative clients, and the bill for his services is huge even by 1999 standards.
he talks about faster than light travel
If you go to the Drupal website, you'll see that Brad posted some brief comments from his interaction with the Dean campaign (9/10/2003).
(Taken from Drupal.org)
I met with a Presidential campaign yesterday. They asked me to advise in general on their web site, but when we got into our discussion, I learned they were doing the static html thing. So, I demoed three CMS' to them - Drupal, Typo3, and a fork of Backend my company developed. They were blown away by all of them,. But I steered them to Drupal for speed of setup, flexibility and features. As a matter of fact, if you compare the features to what Howard Dean has on his site, you are basically setup with everything he has.
Having managed campaigns for a living in a previous life, I realized that if a Presidential campaign is this far behind technologically, then there are likely hundreds of candidates running now and next year that will not have a system in place. Additionally, most do not have the budget of this campaign and are unable to hire developers, designers, and writers, but know it is necessary.
Regardless, it is quite impressive to see an open project get this kind of press (Presidential campaigns?), and the modifications given back to the community?! Ye gods! w00t!
Here's the Freshmeat page for the project.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
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.
A group of computer scientist professors is creating . This is not the same as GNU's Free Software Internet Voting. Given the Diebold fiasco there's a greater need for these than for the software to discuss potential candidates.
"There's so much left to know/ and I'm on the road to find out." -Cat Stevens
...until his genome is sequenced and released under the GNU GPL. Accept nothing less!
In other news, the Bush administration has decided to counter the Howard Dean campaign's effort to create a network of weblogs ("blogs") by giving Republican supporters access to the surplus WMD which were recently discovered at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland.
"We hope that our supporters use the smallpox virus in a way that will support our common goals" stated White House insider Karl Rove. "We think that the time has come to deal with the infidel huns who are attempting to thwart our ultimate goal of establishing a reactionary, protestant theocracy with President Bush as Ayatollah. Using smallpox in areas where there are concentrations of liberal and Democratic voters will surely help us to win an outright majority in the next election. Jew York, here comes Itchy and Scratchy!" Rove went on to describe the plan to trade smallpox-infected blankets to residents of New York City in exchange for wampum.
Democrats in Congress criticized the move, calling it cynical at best and mass murder at worst. In the Senate today, Ted Kennedy (D-MA) spoke to the issue, calling the use of biological weapons by Republican campaigners, "worse than anything than Daddy ever did, and that's saying a lot." Senator Kennedy was later found garroted in his chambers in what appears to be the work of a lone assassin. See our related story for information on the investigation, including the appointment of Chief Justice Rehnquist to a commission to investigate the assassination of Senator Kennedy.
Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) chastized the President for the move as well, calling it "barbaric". Senator Clinton was last seen ushering her husband, former President Bill Clinton, into a limosine bound for his office in Harlem. "Bill needs to be in the right place to do the most good during this crisis." Commentators noted that Senator Clinton did not seem alarmed that her husband was going into one of the hardest-hit areas. Staffer John McClintock was quoted as saying that [Senator Clinton] seemed to be "strangely peaceful" as former President Clinton left for Harlem and that "she danced a jig similar to the one Hitler did when his troops defeated the French."
GF.
[just laugh people, just laugh]
Lots of petrified grits
Slashdot killed the Dean campaign website. He has lost my vote. How can run for President if you cant keep your blog runnning.
---- Berlin Brown http://www.newspiritcompany.
That's simply untrue, and everything2 needs to be corrected. Algore2000.com ran Apache+PHP on Linux (1.3.9 in 1999, 1.3.12 in 2000).
FWIW: Bush2000.com ran IIS/W2K, BuchananReform.org ran IIS/NT4, VoteNader.org ran Apache/BSD.It's entirely likely that Dean's site doesn't have the caching module enabled (which it isn't by default). With it, there's only one SQL hit per page. Without it, the entire page gets built for every page-view (slooooow).
Drupal.org has caching enabled, and therefore hasn't fallen over (yet). But we don't have all that much bandwidth, so it's being *very* slow at the moment.
I've been developing Drupal for a few months now. It has a very active developer community and continues to get more flexible and modular with each successive release. It's much more extensible and better architected than (for example) PostNuke.
We're also coming up on a new release (4.3) which should go RC in the next few days. If you're thinking of trying it out, I'd recommend either waiting for that, or getting latest CVS tarball - things are much nicer than 4.2!
Although the shouting in the title definitely makes it LOOK like a troll...
Guys, I got a problem. This isn't related to this topic exclusively, but for ALL Gnu articles here... Okay, here it is. The icon for "Gnu is not Unix" here at Slashdot doesn't really look like a Gnu at all. It looks like a giant penis carrying a security blanket. Really. Take a close look at it. Are those two big red balls supposed to be feet? What does that logo MEAN?
We need to change that logo to something that doesn't have hidden meanings. I suggest the typical Gnu head (no pun intended) that RMS uses on his website.
to directly communicate our views on technology policy to government. Most of our representatives couldn't even tell you what the DMCA is, much less give two shakes about why it's bad. They're in the pockets of special interests.
/. interview would be the perfect opportunity to imprint their campaign and let them know we're out here.
But it occurs to me that the Dean campaign is the best shot we have to turn the fight for online freedoms around. They're an organization that's volunteer-run, so it's not beholden to special interests. They use OSS to run their site and various tools, and now they're open-sourcing their stuff, so they're going to understand why free software is so important. Finally, as a tech-driven campaign they're predisposed to sympathize with our take on issues like privacy, frivolous patents, etc.
And as far as I know, they haven't yet expressed any kind of position on tech issues. So a
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
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.
[ home ]
The real link to the site for the community behind this is deanspace.org. The deanspace software is based on drupal 4.2. It'd be nice if the developers over there contributed back to the Drupal codebase - it's dangerously close to a fork, and needn't be. The upcoming Drupal 4.3 has some features 4.2 is lacking, and is much more user-friendly. It'd be a pity to lose these when a fork isn't necessary.
Not according to netcraft:
:)
Linux Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) secured_by_Raven/1.4.2 PHP/4.0b3 16-Jan-2000 216.35.210.246 Cable & Wireless
NT4/Windows 98 Microsoft-IIS/4.0 10-Jul-1999 208.206.40.209
So he did switch, but not until 2000.
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.
Isn't the Bush campaign releasing software for both touch-screen and online voting? Ok, so they're not releasing it, just making sure the companies who are don't have any competition. Or have to bid. Or make it secure. Still, it's going to have a way bigger impact than anything Dean does. ;-P
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
DeanSpace development comunity - Website : http://DeanSpace.org0 .html
0 1101.htm
0 1/
Articles: http://drupal.org/node/view/2267
Wired News http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59497,0
Dan Gillmore http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/65
Reason Online http://www.reason.com/links/links081303.shtml
Hesie Online (german) http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/jk-26.08.03-0
I want to see the Dean campaign (or somebody!) release software implementing alternative voting methods. Everybody's talking about voting machines, but not many are talking about the software and algorithms, which make more of a difference IMHO. Dean has expressed support for Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), but there are better methods out there.
I've built an online poll demonstrating these methods (see my sig), but I wouldn't call my stuff release-worthy just yet (it's pretty slow, and I lost my source in a HD crash last week anyway)...
Read my keyboard review.
Does that sound like the left wing freak Lieberman and the bogus DLC want you to think he is? Note also all the republicans actively supporting Dean (he's doing for the Dems what McCain did for the reps four years ago, only much better).
Karl Rove said he wanted Dean to win, but Rove is an ignorant son of a mother who is about to learn the meaning of "Be careful what you wish for!"
when was the last time the Republicans successfully concealed a conspiracy. . .
Well, there was the 2004 election...
Oh wait, Gen. Clark told me to keep quiet about the whole time-travel thing. Forget I said anything.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Given all the donations that the Calif recall candidate Cruz Bustamonte received from Indian tribes I am suprised he is not releasing patches for Apache.
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.
Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, used to be an advisor to Progeny
(a commercial version of Debian started by the Debian founders). Joe
is very tech and Linux savvy. He has stated that the way he has been running
the Dean campaign was inspired by how Open Source software works.
I have been pretty active with the Dean folks for a few months and
I think what he is saying is no BS, it really seems very open
and two way like Open Source software.
My income tax plan: First $20,000 is tax free. $40,000 for married couples. Each dependent (child) is an additional $5,000 before taxes kick in. All income after that is taxed at 15%. No loopholes, no exceptions. Eliminate the Earned Income Tax Credit. You should have to pay taxes to get a tax refund. You can adjust the numbers as needed, but that would be a simple and fair tax code. The rich would pay their fair share, no more, no less. The poor would not pay anything.
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.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Principles for an Internet Policy
This nation - and not just this nation - needs to have an honest conversation about what's real, possible and desirable when it comes to the gift of the Internet. Conversations need shared ground. Here are the beliefs we think should guide the development of a fact-based federal policy. We put these forward as part of a continuing Great American Conversation . . .
The Internet does not exist for the unique benefit of any group or economic interest. It is ours as citizens of this country and as inhabitants of this planet.
The social, economic, and educational advantages of being on the Internet are real. Universal Internet access regardless of economic or geographic position should be a federal goal.
The Internet provides a new possibility of global access to an unprecedented sum of human knowledge. It is the responsibility of this generation to make sure that knowledge is available for innovation in business and culture.
The Internet was initially designed as a way of moving bits without preferring some bits to others. Network architects call this principle "end-to-end" networking. That way, anyone with a good idea - or a bad one - can build it and see if it works. This openness is essential to the Internet's value as a marketplace of innovation and a public square for ideas.
Although the Internet certainly can be used to broadcast messages and programs from one spot to hundreds of millions of others, its most important effect socially and economically is its transformation of the broadcast model. Rather than "freedom of the press belonging to those who own one," everyone now can reach everyone else. The Internet is encouraging people to speak up, in their own voice, about what matters to them. This empowerment of human voice and conversation is profoundly in line with the ideals of American democracy.
The Internet is not perfect and it never will be. It is a global network providing possibility of connecting to geniuses and pickpockets and worse. We need to work to root out illegal and malicious uses of the Internet and the exploitation of children and other vulnerable members of our society.
Although the Internet has connected 700,000,000 people worldwide, it is just at its beginning. We need to recognize that no one yet knows the true potential of the Internet. And we need to support the political and technological policies that will help the Internet grow to its true capacity as a force for democracy world-wide.
Errr.... hey clueboy, all of the 'Gore lies' were manufactured by the press. His statements on Love Canal, working on a farm, Love Story, and etc. were all true. He was widely misquoted by right-wing liars to give the impression that he was exaggerating.
In 2002 I developed a voter contact management system (phone bank) for a municipal campaign in a medium sized Canadian city (pop 78,000). It was based on Linux/Apache/PHP/PostgreSQL, and was only accessible to volunteers within the campaign office LAN.
Some things I learned from the Experience are:
I'm hopeing to apply what I've learned and what I've learned since to building a system suitable for the next federal election.It'll probably be a combination of Servlets and domain model objects, PostgreSQL, and PL/pgSQL stored procedures.
So tell me, what has Clark lied about?
I've seen George Will lie about Clark lying. Will cut-n-paste the transcript from the June 15th Meet the Press to construct statements Clark never said. I've seen Rush repeat Will's lie in the WSJ. I haven't seen Clark lie.
The transcript for the Meet the Press episode is available online.
http://stacks.msnbc.com/news/927000.asp?cp1=1
Hi blog page is a hyper exclamation mark festival which has compared him to a "rock star" of politics. I don't want to vote for a rock star, as that image does not connote accountability (or even talent, given todays RIAA-manufactured boy bands).
To participate in his meetups, you have to click through an agreement that binds you into arbitration and robs you of your right to a jury trial in the event of a related dispute. To me, this makes Dean sound more like a giant corporation out to squish hapless citizens than a man who is trying to elevate dialog.
I have written more than one email to the address listed as the official input for the campaign. Brief, easily digested, thoughtful messages that invite responses. I've heard nothing back. I don't take it personally, but it certainly raises the question: is Dean fundamentally using the internet as anything more than a broadcast medium? I am only one person so I can't state the aggregate, but it's all I have to base a judgement on regarding what Dean is doing with the net. I grant him major points for so clearly being aware of the internet; now I'd like some indication that he can use it as a two way medium and not just as a louder bullhorn.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.