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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?"
Not as much the Party Ideals that choose the Operating System, But the more active supporters who choose the OS.
Democrats generally have a younger following then the republicans. More younger people know how to use Linux and know enough about it to use it properly. So Democrats will typically use Linux.
Republicans tend to have an older following and they will use what they know. If they don't know then they will use what most people seem to use. So that will be windows.
Also Open Source People tend to bereave in a more socialistic view that is more compatible with the democrats views so Linux and OSS People will be more likely to support Democrats.
Hillary Clinton is a more of a moderate candidate so bulk of the Linux supporters (who are typically more liberal) will not be as much encouraged to help her, while the general moderate population will be more willing to support her, so they will use what they know and the general population knows windows.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I don't plan on doing a students t-test or anything, but these results seem pretty significant to me. You're right that the candidates probably don't know what operating system their web server is running, so instead it speaks more to the kind of people they hire to run their web servers. One can easily make generalizations about both groups, so I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Even the more moderate Republican candidates such as Ron Paul and Rudy Guliani are running Linux whereas most of the true right wingers are running windows and most of the true left wingers are running linux or BSD.
Perhaps this can be construed as a statement of American corporatism seeing as the fundamentals of a Republican viewpoint involve making sure there are plenty of jobs by making sure the corporations do well. This would mean that "buying American" is the way to go. The Democratic viewpoint however, encourages the little man to do well so saving money and being a savvy consumer on an individual level are preferred along with "giving the little guy a chance" so various flavors of linux and BSD come into play there.
Definitely an interesting find!
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Agreed. This tells us absolutely nothing about the candidates themselves. However, what it can tell us is what their supporters believe. And the prediction that linus will win is easy, linux is used by the most candidates. One study I'd like to see is if political affiliation correlates to a particular OS for average users.
If Ron Paul wins, then Linux will too.
telnet www.ronpaul2008.com 80
Trying 74.205.85.10...
Connected to www.ronpaul2008.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.1
HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2007 17:17:44 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat)
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Connection closed by foreign host.
When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. - Jefferson
Wasn't McCain the guy who used the templates and didn't give the credit were it said you needed to do on Myspace and even had the gull to pull the pictures from the template makers website which let him replace it with a joke image?
It probably was the 12 year old neighbor.
The fact that slashdot seems to think this is newsworthy is absolutely absurd. As many others said the candidates probably don't know anything about what servers their respective campaigns are running. Furthermore, this looks like an attempt at political influence based on this 'information'. If as a voter you choose based on a small thing like server OS, you really don't deserve to vote IMO. Maybe instead we could see more useful information on the candidate's respective views on OSS policy and DRM issues. Or even privacy records? Try again,
You may not be aware of this, but some hosting companies do have political 'affiliations'. Either because the owners are partisan, or because partisans happen to flock to that company for hosting.
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o0t!
I'm not so sure that it doesn't have an implication of their political leanings. While I don't think that any of the canidates are closely enough involved to even know what is running their web server, it had to be decided by someone. It gives a lot more insite into the beliefs of the people they surround them with than what they believe directly, but it has been my experience that most people surround themselves with people that have similar beliefs.
It makes sense that people that have a strong belief in personal freedoms would prefer an open source solution over a corporate one. It makes sense that people that have a belief that strong corporations provide a more stable economy would shy away from an open source solution. People that develop campaigns through grass roots perfer to have a root account that was developed by grass root means, and people that are use to buying support want an operating system that was paid for and handed to them ready to go.
This doesn't mean that all Democratic canidates are going to run linux, it means that a larger portion of people that run linux are probably not Republican. If those administrators are going to support a campaign with their existing Linux servers, it will most likely not be Republican. If a larger corporation is going to support a canidate, it will most likely be one that historically supports large corporations. Being a large corporation and entrenched in the corporate world, they probably have existing Windows servers.
I am not stating this is all fact, just suggesting a plausable theory in support of the numbers.
Maybe Republicans use a more professional corporation for web work that recognizes that Windows is better than Linux for web development.
I mean, come on, its 2007 and Linux keeps falling farther and farther behind in developmental tools. Sure KDevelop and the like aren't far behind where Visual C++ is, but that's only because MS has made a FoxPro out of it. These days, the action is in C# and right now Linux simply does not have an environment that can even compare to Visual C#. It just doesn't.
So, yes, I love Linux, but its largely because the platform is wide open and I can contribute to it, but, I'm not stupid enough to pretend that it's still 1995 and Unix is flat out better than Windows. It isn't any more. In many conceivable ways, ease of development, management, programmability, Windows is easier to use than Linux is. Windows Server is expensive, but it is a darned good operating system.
Sure, go for Linux, and the ideology and the history, but Republicans will have none of that in something as a critical as a campaign, and they will go with Windows. If you would have taken this poll 10 years ago, sure, Republicans would have all be hosting on Suns, I'm sure.
This is my sig.
Referring to my other calculations, one could argue that the chances of this happening by chance are about 1 in 7. So, yes, as you say, not statistically significant. What is interesting is that Hillary (arguably the most conservative Democrat) is the one Democratic Windows user, and two of the four Republican Linux users are Ron Paul and John McCain. So, I do not believe it is "pure randomness", but that hypothesis cannot be ruled out. (I.e., you're absolutely correct in every sense.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I have no idea how this was modded up and didn't bother to read the last half.
/etc files from the tape backup. Issues like this makes administrators prefer unix.
For those who read my comments and I am not a gnu zealot nor am I 100% pro linux but it has its uses as a server and IT professionals swear by unix. I like MS environments where its right for the job and nice as a clients.
But to say Linux is immature and years behind windows is flamebait to say the least. Still and I mean still Windows/IIS has not overtaken Unix! Now switching the tables how many years has the www been out? Apache or Jakarta is hear to stay for the vast majority of websites out of rackspace.
Sure linux does not have this wonderful ASP.net that can be learned in a "learn vb.net in 24 hours" book, though Mono is making progress. But Linux/Unix has:
1.)Stability
2.) Configurability
3.) Security
4.) Clusterability
5.) Lower TCO
Java Servlets can scale many times over asp.net if you ask any expert who has tried both. Also IIS before the latest version was very bad and was filled with security holes and was unstable.
Serves need to run with low maintance. Explain to me how to restore part of a Windows server installation without restoring the whole thing? You can't due to the windows registry. With unix you can just get some of your
So if you have money to burn and all your programmers are ms fanboys then go with iis/.net but its going to cost more in extra redundancy.
http://saveie6.com/
My boss is head of the IT department and pretty computer savy; Not uber-geek but he knows what Linux is and has tried Ubuntu for a desktop. His boss knows what machines cost since she approves budgets for various departments but I seriously doubt she has ever sat at a Linux console, she probably sees it as a server OS. Her boss, and the last in our chain, has probably heard of Linux and knows it has to do with computers, maybe even servers. The fact is that only my boss needs to basically understand why we need Linux in some places, Unix in others and Windows in the others. If he understands more, it isn't because he needs to in order to do his job well and the officers he answers to don't need to either. They need to understand people and listen to good advice. Our IT is run pretty well, not because people at the top understand the technology, but because they listen to good advice and hire good staff. I think the same is the most we can ask from our politicians. They're not going to be tech savy and the last thing I want is someone in office who thinks they are geek enough to decide the course. I want someone who knows how to hire and listen to good people, in particular people who understand detailed IT issues.
I suspect these results don't reflect politics of OS nearly as much as they reflect the type of people that the sides tend to employ. If you were to look at who is running most Republican sites, I suspect you'll find older people who have many years of experience in managing IT. They won't be experimenters, won't think of software as politically associated, and still think of Linux as a new thing that might get interesting some day. If you look in the Democratic camps, you'll probably find more students and people with strong ties between their software preferences and their belief systems. More than likely you can tell who is most influential with which age groups by what their IT people choose, but I doubt you'll find out anything about their personal views on software. Politicans are nearly always extroverts with a strong focus on relationships, the computer systems just tell you what kind of relationships they tend to achieve.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
I was surprised that Obama and Clinton had actually started putting videos on youtube [...]
I'm not. This is because 90+% of all staffers in most political campaigns are either current students or recent college graduates. When I volunteered in the 2006 election for a gubernatorial candidate that had been in office in the legislature for 20 years, we had a pretty solid YouTube presence. This is because every single staffer was internet savvy. I was the only volunteer for the campaign that didn't have a Facebook or Myspace account as far as I'm aware.
Social networking was primarily tapped by Democrats in 2004 thanks to the Dean campaign, but 2006 and on has shown that both sides are about equally savvy in this respect.
As long as politicians are mired in old thinking and do not understand current technology we will continue to have problems with the way technology is regulated and how it is being incentivised (or not).
Side note: This will ALWAYS be a problem because politicians don't really start getting into senior positions to affect things until they're in their 40's or later. Most of the cutting edge of technology is driven by people in their 20's. This generation gap does not look like it's going to change any time in the future.
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