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 It was these outdated options that convinced team Obama to build all the campaign tech in-house.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

put up or shutup time

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok folks put up or shut up time

Open source and 'bad people' can use your code. Or keep it closed...

Re:put up or shutup time

[Charliemopps]

They are the same evil. Your mentality IS the problem with this country. You are what keep this bullshit going. Just stop... get out of politics. Don't vote... please. If only the people that actually cared about this country, and the people having hellfire missles landing in their livingrooms got to vote, then maybe we'd get somewhere. We're involved militarily in more countries now, than when Bush was in office. How is that the lesser of 2 evils?

Often we hear about candidates that they are "Radical" or out of the "mainstream" If the normal mainstream is bombing nearly every country in the African continent, most countries in the middle east, ans southern Asia, then we definitely need a radical in office. The people do not need our "help" the help is usually worse than what they had before. Also, our country is on the fiscal decline. That's ok, we don't have to be the richest country on earth by several orders of magnitude. We can live comfortably... but we do not have all this extra money to be pretending to be the worlds police force. We have a crap ton of nukes, no ones going to invade us. So lets just scale back a "tad" Shit, if we spent the military budget on building bases on the moon we could just move there and let the world go to shit on it's own (just kidding, but really... the military budgets way too big.)

Re:put up or shutup time

[LordLimecat]

Don't vote... please. If only the people that actually cared about this country, and the people having hellfire missles landing in their livingrooms got to vote, then maybe we'd get somewhere

Has it occurred to you that in the 200+ years of only having US citizens vote (mostly), we HAVENT had a major revolution, we havent had a substantial invasion (excepting the War of 1812), we havent had any dictators, and we generally have been pretty stable compared to almost everywhere else (along with perhaps the UK).

But no, our system is flawed and clearly the solution is to throw out what has been working remarkably well given how messed up people generally are. Lets go with anarchy, thats always a great fallback, right?

If you ask me, I would go with "lets address the problems we have" rather than "lets throw it all away and hope things dont get substantially worse".

Re:put up or shutup time

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't consider the Civil war a major revolution? It is the war in which more Americans were killed than any other. There was even a President of the Confederate States of America. Seems pretty major to me. We haven't had a successful, violent revolution.

Aside from that I agree we can assume the base of this democracy is solid. But it does need much work.

simple.

[ThorGod]

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.

Ethical concerns

[hawguy]

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.

Re:In light of all the gerrymandering going on ...

[pixelpusher220]

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.