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 It was these outdated options that convinced team Obama to build all the campaign tech in-house.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."'"

Comments

Re:so republicans never get access to it ...

[damn_registrars]

Because they don't care about good policy, they care about their team winning.

Granted, the republicans did show in 2012 that there are actually millions of people in this country who are so partisan that they will vote for anyone with an (R) after their name, regardless of policy, just to remove someone who instead has a (D) after theirs. But the republicans already know who these people are and how to find them; they don't need sophisticated software to do that.

So indeed, they don't give a shit about policy and might well never again now that they have been boxed into a corner and forced to depend on hyper partisans rather than issue and policy voters. However this means that the Obama team really doesn't have much to worry about in terms of the possible outcome of the republicans getting their software.