February 8th, 2008
Who is the open source candidate?
A blog called Vanduska made the argument yesterday that Barack Obama is the candidate for open source. (To the right, the candidate and his mother circa 1964.)
Vanduska recalls Obama’s Google interview, where the gentleman from Illinois supported all the open source buzzwords — network neutrality, Internet freedom, bottom-up change. He even nailed the database question — a bubble sort is not the way to go.
In fact Obama leads in donations from Google employees. The Valley’s popular vote may have gone to Hillary Clinton, but don’t confuse the tech industry with the open source movement. (And don’t confuse early votes with current opinion, Declan.) Besides Microsoft and Apple, proprietary giants, are still in the tech industry.
Rather than get into a political argument with others at C|Net, I would like to take this opportunity to ask the readers of this blog whether open source even enters into their political calculations, and if so how.
Would President McCain do for open source what President Obama might do? What about President Hillary Clinton?
Maybe they all talk the talk. Do you think any can walk the walk? Or are you already sick of this political nonsense? (Please don’t say yes — we’re still a week from Valentine’s Day.)
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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