Can You Get Votes Promoting Open Source Software As a Solution?
As we are in the midst of another endless election cycle, they seem to no longer stop do they, I thought I would look to see if any politicians are using open source as part of their campaign messaging. Even more than that, do you think this is a winning argument that can sway voters?
For example, Rhode Island independent candidate Lincoln Chafee “today announced that as Governor he will issue an Executive Order on Open Government, through which he will implement a plan to utilize modern information technologies to make government services easier to use, government operations more transparent, and government more efficient overall.” Full release at https://seeclickfix.blogspot.com/2010/10/ri-independent-gubernatorial-candidate.html. Note, I am totally unfamiliar with anything Rhode Island or its politicians and am in no way making a promotion of one candidate over another, but I am interested that a candidate is using open source promotion as a campaign platform.
Bsaed on this announcement, I thought I would see what someone such as Meg Whitman, running for Governor of California had to say on this issue, after all, she is from eBay and Silicon Valley so I expect to see details on her site. I read the site and her entire solutions for California document and found nothing about using the power of open source software to reduce costs, etc. I only saw the standard “modern technology” text which means nothing. To be fair, I also looked to see what Jerry Brown had to say on this topic as well. There was no mention of open source as well. In fact, I was not able to find any other candidate running for office that specifically mentioned open source software as a solution to the government funding problems.
Based on my looking around, the announcement from Lincoln Chafee in RI really is unique and something to be applauded. Perhaps we as an open source community should take some time to consider how we can better educate candidates and the government to consider open source as a significant cost reduction solution for their IT infrastructure. What are your thoughts? Are you involved in a political campaign and helping to push the open source message? Do you even think that this is a viable campaign message? Looking forward to seeing if there is a small open source movement out there to push open source as the IT solution of NOW.
Finally, when looking for candidates and open source comments, I saw some people creating open source software to better help candidates run their campaigns. For example, Open Campaigns (www.opencampaigns.net) and CiviCRM (http://civicrm.org) are open source solutions for public campaigns. There were many proprietary vendors, especially consultants, who posted lots of information on the evils and dangers of open source; perhaps someone should tell these folks that Microsoft and the open source community have already has this argument for quite some time and the issues seems to be settled. I guess this community of people is too new to the concept of open source to realize that this is not some amazing new model invented by the great political class.
