Will Linux Win the Next Presidential Election?

i_like_spam writes "Douglas Karr has posted an interesting breakdown, complete with bar charts, of the operating systems and server software used by the websites for 23 declared and undeclared presidential candidates. The breakdown shows that there is nearly an equal split between Linux and Windows servers among the whole candidate pool. More interesting, all of the Democratic candidates except for Hillary favor Linux or FreeBSD. 69% of the Republican candidates, in contrast, prefer Windows. Is this preference for OSS or Microsoft a true reflection of differing political philosophies? And, more importantly, will Linux win the next election?"

Comments

Interesting omission

[benhocking]

Interesting that in the short list you provided, you omitted the party that some people credit for causing Gore to lose the 2000 election. (I'm not making that claim, I'm just pointing out the claim.)

Re:What About Independents, Libertarians, socialis

[Short Circuit]

Well, according to Netcraft, the libertarians, communists and independent parties's sites are all running Linux. The American Green party is running FreeBSD.

Re:Good to know

[WilliamSChips]

What the OP means is that it's not as big a deal as people are making it out to be. The whole "car accidents kill more people" argument and such.

Re:Parent was funny, not insightful! :(

[Khomar]

For starters, there is _NO_ ubuntu christian edition.

Actually, there is. It looks to basically be Ubuntu with some free Bible and other related software included. The link that the grandparent posted was a mock site.

Re:It *does* reflect thinking of the candidates

[RailGunner]

This is also mirrored in funding. Dems (especially this cycle) will tend to get lots of smaller donations, while Republicans will get larger and fewer donations. Check the news stories.

You should check the news stories, because you've got the donation patterns backwards. The GOP gets smaller, but more, donations, and the Democrats get larger and fewer donations from Hollywood and George Soros types.

Re:Even More Shocking

[Dog-Cow]

There is no "W" in the Hebrew alphabet. The 6th letter, transliterated, would be "V".

Re:It *does* reflect thinking of the candidates

[esconsult1]

Dude, (or dudette), read this and weep:
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/donordems.asp?cy cle=2008

For the under $200 donations, here's the breakdown:
Dems: 34,705
Reps: 27,710

From the graphs it looks like some other candidates get a larger portion of http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/geog.asp?id=N000 00286&cycle=2008

So please, don't trot out the usual suspects (Hollywood and George Soros) before doing some research.

Re:Intelligent Design? Or Evolution?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

The basis of 'Intelligent Design' is that humans were essentially fully formed at their creation

No, that's not what ID says; you're thinking of young-earth creationism. ID'ers accept that evolution happened, but stipulate that certain complex structures could not have arisen through the processes of mutation and natural selection; the designer (by which, of course, they always mean God, even if they don't admit it) had to give things a little nudge in the right direction from time to time.

All creationism is bunk, but if you're going to criticize specific flavors of it, it's a good idea to know what you're criticizing; otherwise it weakens your argument and makes it easier to dismiss.

Re:Perhaps your bias is showing?

[Chandon Seldon]

The whole reason the Student test was developed was to work with small samples. You know... beer taste testing where you can't have the same tester drink a hundred beers at once.

Re:Intelligent Design? Or Evolution?

[BytePusher]

ID(intelligent design) doesn't go so far as to say anything about the mechanism of how animal life, plant life or anything in the cosmos came into being in it's current form or otherwise. All ID theory states is that statistically it's impossible for what is now have come to be without some intelligence guiding the process. So ID is compatible with any theology or explanation of the universe which came to be through some intelligent guidance. The six day creation is another story and there are many ID theorists which do not believe in a 6 day creation, who do believe in some form of evolutionary process.

Re:It *does* reflect thinking of the candidates

[RailGunner]

Link to article discussing the "soft-money" donations, and how the GOP is wiping the floor with the Dems.

Your OpenSecrets link is misleading and inaccurate, because politicians are not required to report the number of sub $200 donations. When you look at the $5 and $10 donations, etc, and do the math correctly, the GOP comes out way ahead of the Democrats right now.

Campaign Finance Reform helped the GOP, too. From that article: The Supreme Court's ruling on campaign finance gives the Republicans, who raise far more in small donations, a big advantage in next year's elections for the White House and Congress.

Re:Yes, the Student test was the wrong one

[Smight]

YOur base assumption is wrong. as of last month about 65% of hosts were running a non-microsoft OS. The proper ration should be 65/35.

Also the decision is usually not random but based on how the candidate can get the best deal. In most cases the only reason you would be using microsoft as the host on your website is if your website was being provided to you by a large corporation that has its own servers and uses microsoft; because the management is only familiar with microsoft project and wants to keep everything consistant.

Re:Doubt it

[kbielefe]

First of all, we're only at a competitive disadvantage if the politicians and lawyers leading other countries are more tech savvy than ours. I highly doubt that is the case, but please provide counterexamples if you know any.

Second, while our leaders may not be tech savvy themselves, they are intelligent enough to at least know the right people to ask for help. If you want to learn a lot about a topic, read the expert testimony at a congressional hearing about it. For example, here is the guest list for a senate hearing a few months ago on net neutrality:

• Mr. Vinton Cerf
  Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google
• Mr. Walter McCormick
  President and CEO, United States Telecom Association
• Mr. Jeffrey Citron
  Chairman and CEO, Vonage
• Mr. Kyle McSlarrow
  President and CEO, National Cable & Telecommunications Association
• Mr. Earl Comstock
  President and CEO, CompTel
• Mr. Kyle Dixon
  Senior Fellow and Director of the federal Institute for Regulatory Law & Economics, The Progress & Freedom Foundation
• Mr. Lawrence Lessig
  Professor of Law, Standford Law School
• Mr. J. Gregory Sidak
  Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center
• Mr. Gary Bachula
  Vice President for External Affairs, Internet2

A pretty impressive list, if you ask me. It would be pretty difficult to walk away from a meeting with that group and not have all the information you need to make a good decision on net neutrality.

If it helps you feel better, you can go on believing that politicians make decisions you disagree with out of ignorance. The truth is, the vast majority of them are highly intelligent, highly educated, and just happen to either have a different point of view than you, or hold the same opinion but allow themselves to succumb to the corrupting influence of money and power.

Re:So how do you explain the results?

[Ardeaem]

You can do Pearson's Chi-squared test of association. The Chi-square is an approximation, and may not hold for smaller sample sizes. Find a p-value by simulation. When you do this, the p-value is .009, indicating that a difference this large would only occur by chance .9% of the time. It is safe to conclude that there is something going down and that the campaigns of Republicans and Democrats do indeed have different preferences with respect to their server OS.

I used R's chisq.test() function.

More likely marketer's preferences...

[rdean400]

I don't think it's a political thing. It's more likely that they hire their PR/marketing firm and they choose where to host the site.

Re:Intelligent Design? Or Evolution?

[DavidTC]

All ID theory states is that statistically it's impossible for what is now have come to be without some intelligence guiding the process.

No scientific theory can ever state the likelihood of something that has only been observed once, especially something where not only are not all the factors known, but things we know are factors are unmeasurable for anywhere except here and maybe a few dozen surrounding stars. But more to the point, it doesn't matter a rat's ass if it's statistically unlikely, because, as far as we know, it's only happened once.

It is statistically unlikely to win the lottery, too, and, yet, people often appear to do so. Odd, huh? Now, it would be astonishing if millions of people won the lottery every day, but if the odds are a million to one against, and a million tickets are bought, it's not actually that amazing that one or two people win. It'd actually be more amazing if no one ever won at all.

Likewise, if we accept if we accept your premise that life is very unlikely, which you actually have absolutely no evidence for, but, if we accept it, it would be astonishing only if life had developed all over the place. Pointing to an empty universe where life developed once, out of trillions of possible places it could have developed, and say 'That's so amazingly unlikely, it's a trillion to one against' doesn't prove meddling, it disproves meddling, and is statistically exactly where you'd expect it to be.

Any statistician...hell, any moderately intelligent human beings...knows you can't interview lottery winners and act surprised they won. Of course they won, that's why you're interviewing them.