What Happened To Obama's Open Source Adviser?

gov_coder writes "Back in January of 2009, various news articles announced that former Sun CEO Scott McNealy was to become the Obama administration's Open Source Technology adviser. Currently, however, a search for Scott on the whitehouse.gov website yields zero results. Searching a bit more, I found that Scott is currently working on CurriWiki, a kind of Wikipedia for school curriculum. So my question is, what happened? Did some lobbyist block the appointment? Did Scott decide his other activities were more important? Scott, if you are out there — please tell us what happened. There are many people working in government IT, such as myself, who were really excited about the possibilities of an expanded role for open source software in government, and are now wondering what went wrong."

Comments

Re:Not a lobbyist

[JesseL]

Just because a lobbyist has no legal authority doesn't mean they're powerless or without influence.

Did you learn everything about politics and government from Schoolhouse Rock?

Re:Not a lobbyist

[JesseL]

Lobbyists aren't always bad, they don't always achieve their goals by unscrupulous means, and they don't always represent corporate interests with tons of money to throw around.

Lobbyists are an exceptionally effective means for people to communicate with their elected representatives, being a sort of representative themselves. They can provide a clear voice for large groups of similarly minded people, who would otherwise be lost in the noise.

Re:Confirmation hell?

[spun]

But if you look at the issues Republicans oppose, you will find that they supported many of those same issues when proposed by Republicans. Like the bailout. No, this is obstructionism, pure and simple. Republicans feel they can not let Obama rack up too many wins. They know their only real chance to regain power is if Obama fails. The Republicans want Obama, and our country, to fail, and so they oppose everything he does, regardless of their own personal beliefs.