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Obama Campaign Seeks LAMP Developers
kgamiel writes "The Obama campaign's CTO is hiring LAMP-biased geeks for the Boston office to help elect the Senator in the fall. This got me to wondering, what if he instead announced a SourceForge project toward the same end? What would such a project look like? Tools that both sides could use 'equally' would not achieve the desired end. And philosophically, could the Open Source community support one side in a competition such as this? What other issues does this raise?" Another reader notes that the Obama campaign is also searching for a security expert to plug the holes that allowed a hacker to redirect Obama's site (Linux/Apache hosted by GoDaddy) to Hillary Clinton's (Windows/IIS hosted by Rackspace).
Actually not.
If you're referring to the injunction "Thou shalt not kill" in the Ten Commandments, you'll find that the word used--transliterated as ratsach--does not necessarily refer to murder. While that is one of its primary meanings, it also includes unintentional killings as well. Indeed, this is the most common use of the word in Deuteronomy. It enjoins the Israelites to found three cities as refuges for those who kill unintentionally, so that they can flee there and be safe from vengeful relatives.
I'm not sure where the claim that it just means "murder" comes from. A good translation and a concordance will quickly show it to be simply and obviously false. In any case, it is shamelessly used by (mostly) Protestant preachers to justify all kinds of killing as not being "murder." Which isn't exactly in the spirit of Christian charity, to my mind.
Not that it matters to me all that much. I haven't been a believer for years.
IIRC, in 2000 Gore's site was taken down because it used Microsoft. So, he switched to Apache. So, OSS has been used in previous campaigns. I'll bet Apache has been used enough to invalidate your assumption that OSS is only now in the ascent in politics.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
It's counted as a campaing contribution, and is chargeable at the same rates as a company would charge to do the same job on contract. The company would obviously charge more than they're paying the devs, to take care of slack time, non-billable hours, overhead (building, administration, compliance, etc), consumables (paper, laser toner, pcs, non-free software), employee benefits, and profit. $100/hr would be on the low side at that point.
Here are several, then.
Howard Dean's 2004 campaign used Drupal to build a website aimed at helping grassroots supporters self-organize. The resulting package was released as a fork called Civicspace, which eventually was reconciled back into the Drupal core and the CiviCRM constitutent relationship management toolkit.
Wesley Clark's 2004 campaign open-sourced an array of projects.
John Edwards has endorsed the concept of open-source software for voting machines and has blogged about open source. Note that Redhat is based in his state.
This year, Christopher Dodd's website was built on Drupal 5, Bill Richardson's with Zope, and all of the Democratic candidates except Hillary Clinton ran Linux or BSD. (Clinton and most of the Republicans ran Windows servers.)
And I'm sure there are other examples.
I don't believe that once Obama graduated from law school, that he ever made less than $60,000 a year. And I'm curious as to which twenty years he spent as a "community organizer"? I'm curious because since 1993 he's worked variously as an associate lawyer or held a state or federal senate seat. None of which are going to be paying $30,000 a year. The twenty years before 1993 would have been 1973 - 1993. Given that he was born in 1961, I'm somewhat suspicious that he was community organizing when he was 12 years old.