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The Software Politics Of 2004's Presidential Race
mjamil writes "The NYT(free registration required) has an article talking about the polarized use of OSS in the building of campaign Web sites. Specifically, it states that the sites for John Kerry (Democratic candidate for President) and the Democratic National Committee are built using OSS, while the site for President Bush's re-election campaign uses IIS. Linus and ESR are quoted. It's an interesting look at how even presidential politics are no longer immune to the free software war (free as in beer)." (David Brunton, pictured in the article, wrote to say "Now I'm going to go call my mom... won't she be proud? For all those girl geeks and gay geeks out there, I'm already taken, but it is an awful nice picture, isn't it?")
I dont know, maybe i'm wrong? It just seems to me that most politicians wouldnt really *care* about what platforms their websites are hosted on..
this has to be the single most unimportant issue in world politics today. I really struggle to believe that anyone would read anything into, or make any kind of an issue over what webserver hosts a politician's website.
What's the reasoning here? "Kerry's webserver runs teh linux, so if he wins he will destroy MS and the world will be happy and live as one with no more wars or fighting."
Bush believes in supporting hard working American workers. Even if he has topay for it, he knows that it's worth it to put food on the plates of his citizens and subjects. He probably also eats American grown food, flies in an American buiolt plane and drives an American car Kerry on the other hand uses foreign imported free software. He thinks that cost is the only area that matters. He probably drives an imported car and flies using foreign airlines such as Quantas and Aeroflot.
I know, I know, don't feed the trolls, but this one is too good. My bet is that you are typing this on a computer that has large chunks of the hardware manufactured in Taiwan and assembled in mainland China(China actually doesn't do much high tech manufacturing...yet). Probably on Microsoft software, Microsoft has had large development centers in India(thus foriegn) for a while.
And while linux may have originated in Finland, a very large chunk of the code was written in the US.
So I find it hard to believe that Kerry's platform is any less American than yours...
I have to wonder if Timothy would have posted this story had it been the other way round? Same as the Greenpeace story earlier. Ooo, political organizations that Timothy personally likes use technology too!
This is not news, Timothy.
I think the article makes a large omission when it doesn't point out that the Internet was a government funded project that grew up with the proto-free software movement. DARPA first approached ATT, then the owner of all phone lines in the country (when modems came along you weren't allowed to plug them directly into a phone line), about building a network based on open protocols and ATT turned them down because they wouldn't be able to control it. Remember AOL before they built in access to the Web? That probably is what the Internet would have looked like had ATT had control over whatever the Internet might have been in that alternate universe. Hell, even in the late 80's the head of ATT said there was no need for NSFnet because they could provide ISDN to the desktop.
It was a specific type of policy oriented towards open-ness that led to the Internet being the way it is. The software that underlies the Internet is free software, it has been and still is the dominant form of software in the infrastructure which makes up the Internet. Open source is not "counter culture" on the Internet as the article portrays. The only reason MS has any role on the Internet is they have leveraged their desktop monopoly.
I wish reporters understood these things.
Wish I had mod points. You put it perfectly, in a wonderfully-similar style as Thomas Jefferson did in the Declaration of Independence where he laid out the King's transgressions.
You may add to your list the following:
* He supports laws which violate the Second Amendment. [e.g. the 1994 Assualt Weapons Ban]
* He supports the arrest and incarceration of those accused of a crime without giving them a trial as required by the Constitution. [in Gitmo. Fortunately, the Supreme Court recently smacked him for doing it.]
* He has attempted to merge church and state. [particularly in schools]
* He has instituted taxes upon the consumers of particular industries so as to aid those industries in their commerce. [e.g. the steel tariffs, although thankfully, they have been reduced from their original level]
I'm sure there's others too if I sat around and thought about it long enough...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?