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To Open Source Obama's Get-Out-the-Vote Code Or Not?
An anonymous reader writes "There's a battle brewing amongst Obama's election team. The political folks want to keep the get out the vote code closed source so republicans never get access to it, but the programmers want it open sourced so it can be improved upon. 'In this sense, the decision to mothball the tech would be a violation of the developers’ ethical principles. But the argument is about more than whether putting the tech back in the hands of the public is the right thing to do. "The biggest issue we saw with all of the commercial election software we used was that it’s only updated every four years," says Ryan. It was these outdated options that convinced team Obama to build all the campaign tech in-house. If the code OFA built was put on ice at the DNC until 2016, it would become effectively worthless. "None of that will be useful in four years, technology moves too fast," said Ryan. "But if our work was open and people were forking it and improving it all the time, then it keeps up with changes as we go."'"
Ok folks put up or shut up time
Open source and 'bad people' can use your code. Or keep it closed...
Personally I wouldn't want my code maintained to levels I've come to expect from open source "standards".
Have the DNC set aside $400k or so to keep a 3 member team of coders updating it for the next 4 years. Don't forget, there are midterms in 2 years.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
Because they don't care about good policy, they care about their team winning.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You mean the same way that Maryland gerrymandered districts to eject a Republican congressman? District 3 in Maryland isn't even consecutive, it is 3 areas of the state that are 10-20 miles apart. Only fair that some Republicans in other states get to do the same.
sudo make me a sandwich
The GOP does not have very sophisticated get out the vote tools.
Evangelical Christianity?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
In this sense, the decision to mothball the tech would be a violation of the developers’ ethical principles.
Unless the developers were tricked into thinking they were developing an open source software platform, I don't see where ethics come in. Why would a business release the software that is widely believed to have given it a competitive advantage?
. "It’s going to send a very bad signal to engineers who might consider working on the next election cycle in 2016," says Rathee. "It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how we work."
There are lots of programmers that understand confidentiality and realize that their code is never going to be open sourced. Is there a growing body of developers that want everything to be open sourced and free to the world?
The things we built off of open source should go back to the public," says Manik Rathee, who worked as a user experience engineer with OFA. The team relied on open source frameworks like Rails, Flask, Jekyll and Django.
Isn't this exactly the type of thing Rails, Flask, Jekyll and Django were built for? To allow developers to quickly develop and deploy applications? This is the kind of FUD that makes corporations afraid to use open source - they think that if they take advantage of an Open Source framework then they are obligated to open source their code even if it's used only for an in-house application.
I don't see the source code for Google's search engine or Facebook's core code available for download even though both companies take advantage of FOSS software in their infrastructure -- that's not to say that they haven't released some of their support code, but the "secret sauce" that runs the business is still private.
The only 'fair' thing is to remove politics from the district drawing process altogether. Not easy or simple, but Money and Political District Drawing are 2 things that quite literally are a direct threat to our governmental system.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
if by batshit crazy you mean advocating the withdrawl of U.S. troops overseas and not wanting to start pointless wars, or supporting 1st, 2nd and 4th Amendment rights and opposing the expansion of TSA, Patriot Act, stop the indefinite detention of American citizens, or wanting to reduce federal spending and balance the budget, or legalize marijuana and stop the war on drugs, or support gay marriage and other civil rights for gays, then yeah I guess he's batshit crazy.
Getting more people to vote is good for the democratic process so the DNC should not look at it as a benefit to the Republicans but instead it is a benefit to all Americans. It should be open sourced so America benefits.
How about we hang both Democrats AND Republicans who gerrymander? That's only fair.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It's easy to do a lot of things, it's hard to do many things well without experience and trial/error.
Such being the case, why make a big stink about it? Release it, and save everyone the trouble.
Well, from an administration who would not release a birth certificate...
My suspicion is they are relying on more than just public, free, and/or legal data.
Posting anonymous to at least get a head start on the kill-squad.
You are making a critical error in your comparisons. You are comparing what Obama has said to what other presidents have done. Obama has been president for a full term now, it is time to look at what he has done.
And if you do that, you will be hard pressed to find a single bill that he has signed that would not have been signed by Reagan. Hell, Obama has even raised taxes fewer times - for a lower total percentage - than Reagan did in his first term.
Every president as a candidate says they will do various things, and each president accomplishes a varied amount of those things (one could argue Obama is distinct in how few of those he has accomplished). However if you are talking about what Reagan, Bush, Clinton, or Bush Jr did, then you need to compare it to what Obama has done. And if you do that, you'll find that he is easily the most conservative of the set. We can even go back further and add Nixon to that set and Obama is arguably more conservative than him as well.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.