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What Happened To Obama's Open Source Adviser?

Posted by kdawson on from the get-over-it dept.

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."

4 of 296 comments (clear)

  1. Confirmation hell? by l2718 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I would not be surprised if McNealy's appointment is stuck in confirmation hell. He probably requires confirmation by the Senate (see Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution). The Obama administration has been very slow in getting their people confirmed, in part because of the concentration on the Supreme Court vacancies, in part because of Republican intransigence (continuing the Democratic intransigence during the Bush administration, which harks back to the conflicts with Clinton, and back and forth it goes ...).

    1. Re:Confirmation hell? by butalearner · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Are you suggesting that Democrats didn't go nuts with Bush hate, or that Republicans didn't go nuts with Clinton hate?

      To this level? No. Have a look at the Senate voting history. Go to 2010 and click on a few, scroll down to the senators list. Republicans are always, without fail, either the exact opposite of the majority of Democrats (usually Nay) or Not Voting. Now go back and click on 2005. Pick any issue you want, and either some Democrats voted with Republicans or vice versa. It's not just people's imagination, the country really is more polarized than ever.

      And the worst part about it is that the rest of your post is correct.

  2. Re:Sun's "open" play was never convincing for me by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I spent a good deal of time fighting him when he was in his anti-open-source mode and didn't believe in his conversion either.

    --
    Bruce Perens.
  3. Re:Not a lobbyist by NevarMore · · Score: 4, Interesting

    +1, the EFF is a lobby.