Open source votes for Obama, and other inconsistencies
The next time you're tempted to pull out your copy of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention or your local LUG (Linux User Group), don't bother. While the open-source world often gets credited with Libertarian leanings, recent poll results from SourceForge, which it provided to me yesterday, don't support this view.
In fact, the poll of US-based Slashdot and SourceForge visitors has 56 percent of this largely open-source crowd voting for big-government Obama, with only 30 percent voting for McCain.
Outside the US, the poll found that 93 percent of international visitors to the sites would vote for Obama if only Acorn would manufacture their registration to vote. (Don't worry - it probably will. :-) A miniscule five percent opted for McCain, and most of them probably thought he was the Scottish usurper to 10 Downing Street, not a US presidential hopeful.
Despite the hippie-esque "free love, free software" soundbites of some early leaders of the open-source (err, "free software") movement, I'm a little surprised by the results.
No, it's not that I think anyone should be excited by McCain's potential presidency, but rather that I view open source as an inherently conservative phenomenon. It is a way of reining in excessive waste and power, and of putting power close to the people (read: system integrators, software users, and developers). These are inherently Republican ideals.
Instead, the Sourceforge crowd seems to be voting for centralized power and government solutions to local problems. Microsoft, in other words.
That said, if I were worried about the accuracy of the polls, I'd just need to correlate the presidential data with the "news source has the least amount of bias or media spin." The top vote? Fox News. Yep. Fox, that paragon of unbiased reporting, barely edged out The New York Times, the other neutral observer of the world's news.
Regardless, as Obama nears a likely four years of doling out stays in the Lincoln Bedroom, we can take heart that absolutely no one outside the US wants to hack his or Senator Biden's email, according to the poll. Could we get those pesky internationals to stop sending spam to Obama's country, too? :-)
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Maybe it's the prevalence of California-based startups? ;-)
I know that in principle, the Right stands for smaller government. In practice, Republicans don't, I'm afraid. They're too busy pandering to evangelical rednecks and all the anti-intellectualism that comes with it, which also turns geeks off generally.
Over the last few years the line between Republicans and Democrats has become increasing blurred. I have only belonged to one political party, the Republican party, but I left many years ago when it was overtaken by the "neo-conservatives". I am currently unaffiliated.
As a small "L" libertarian, the Republican party no longer represents my interests. I am for maximizing social freedom, minimizing government and being fiscally responsible. The Republican party represents none of that.
You refer to "big-government Obama" but it was the current Republican administration that greatly increased the size of government (such as new cabinet-level positions in Homeland Security and the new bailout czar), spent money like a sailor on leave, implemented a trillion dollar tax payer supported welfare program for the country of Iraq, and implemented domestic spying policies and new classifications such as "enemy combatants" that chip away at our freedom.
While I don't view Obama as the second coming, he does represent an indictment of the last eight years, and you are fooling yourself if you think that the Republican party represents the opposite of "centralized power and government solutions to local problems".
The free software crowd is more worried about being spied on by their own government and having their laptop seized at the border (along with a slim but non-negative chance of ending up with a free trip to Cuba) than any worries about free healthcare and higher taxes.
I don't think that there is any doubt that McCain would have performed better than George W. Bush as President, but he has brought nothing to the table that said he would change the policies that have brought us to the brink of economic collapse. His choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate was reckless, especially considering that a 72 year old man has a 15% chance of dying before his 76th birthday. That was one of the main reasons he lost my vote.
This doesn't mean that there are not some libertarians still among the Republican party (I plan to vote for Bill Lawson for Congress) but it no longer represents those ideals at the national level.
This election is not about the traditional labor/big government vs. business/small government division usually represented by the Democratic and Republican parties but more about do we like where the country has gone in the last eight years? For those of us who value personal freedom the answer is a resounding "no" and thus you'll see a lot of first time voters for a Democratic presidential candidate.
If you believe the Democrats *or* Republicans have anything to do with the supposed platforms they represented (and I'm being generous) 30 years ago, then I would say you're in for a rude awakening, but I would have thought that history would have already shown you their platforms have nothing to do with their actions for many years, so... good luck with that worldview. ;)
The government is bigger today then it ever has been. The government will need to get bigger to correct the mistakes of Reagan, Bush I, II, and to a slightly lesser degree Clinton. Free markets require government intervention, just ask Alan Greenspan.
Open source advocates(with a few glaring exceptions) are intelligent. They may not support everything Obama says, but he is miles ahead of McCain and Caribou Barbie in terms of intelligence, thoughtfulness, rationality, and just plain decency. McCain and Palin has shown no intelligence, which is why the remaining red states tend to be on the lower educated side. That is why Palin's crowds get frothed up in a frenzy of hatred, because they are chumming the shallow end of the gene pool.
A few things make me nervous about Obama, but I am still voting for him because there is no rational alternative. Personally I am hoping he does something that has yet to be done from an administration following a criminal one: hold them responsible.
Matt, I don't think that certain positions are inherently Republican or Democratic, or even inherently Libertarian, from what I've seen of them. These positions are deliberately chosen and pursued, even if it takes generations for various notions to take hold.
The last twenty years are causing a lot of political rethinking. The parties are in flux. Lines are being redrawn. The next few years should be interesting. They shouldn't be, but they will be. And that means rough times ahead, because so much power is at stake.
That said, I'd like to comment on the Ayn Rand reference. A few years back, someone wrote an article showing that open source is fully compatible with free-market capitalism, and used Rand's writings as a touchstone to show it.
Some advocates of open-source software may sound hippie-ish, but those advocates are already aware that the politics of freedom are more complex than the colors of the states on TV.
Fiscal policy is the most important thing the government does. Travel to any third-world nation and observe how little time they have to worry about the social issues that occupy so much of our politics.
The current fiscal disaster is directly attributable to violations of the open source principles of meritocracy, transparency and trust.
To explain, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both at the center of this crisis, are government sponsored monopolies created by social engineering policies that granted them lower borrowing costs through governmental lines of credit, exemption from state and local taxes, and lower capital reserve requirements, amongst other advantages. This concentrated risk and amplified poor decision making (such as allowing no money down, interest only loans, for poor credits, to be considered conforming). Transparency was limited when congress inexplicably exempted Fannie and Freddie from Sarbenes-Oxley - the transparency legislation that every other public company operates under. (Of course, this might be explained by millions in campaign contributions). Finally, trust was shattered once the executives of these corporations decided to cook the books. (Why these exec's are not in orange jumpsuits remains a mystery, unless one cynically believes that political contributions had something to do with it.)
Of course these violations of open source principles were justified by the noble concept that everyone should own a home (regardless of down payment, income or credit history). And of course only an omnipotent federal government could have forced these violations on institutions that initially resisted. Witness the extension of the Community Reinvested Act by Presidential Executive orders under Clinton and DoJ sponsored lawsuits against banks through the 90's for not participating in the sub-prime market.
Had the government not sponsored these monopolistic bureaucracies, many private firms would have participated in the CDO market diversifying risk and providing a broad spectrum of investment philosophies. In a Meritocracy of Ideas, the failure of bad ideas only strengthens the better ideas..
More broadly, imagine 50 states competing to most efficiently provide services and mitigate the impact of taxation versus today's reality where the states act as appendages of a monolithic, wasteful and often corrupt federal government.
Even more broadly, the taking from one person to do good is inherentlyflawed in that it; 1) requires the application or threat of force, and 2) people never spend other people's money as prudently as they spend their own.
Moreover, the threat of force means a violation of civil liberties and as history has often demonstrated such a socialistic approach approach often leads to extreme violations of individual liberties. Imagine how long Linux would prosper if Linus mandated that the best programmers dedicate half their time to projects he chose. Imagine the long-term impact if the richest American's wealth was confiscated each year and given to 120 million American families. Nice for the families as Warren Buffet's fortune would translate into about $500 each, not so good for Warren's civil liberty. It is also a safe bet that finding the next richest American the second year would be more of a challenge and the check would be considerably smaller.
In the decision between two lesser evils, more than anything else, always support the one less likely to grow a centralized and potentially-corruptible bureaucracy- that is the Open Source Way!
There are going to be socialists who work on or believe in open source because it levels playing fields and maximizes utility for everyone.
There are going to be new democrats who work on or believe in open source because of a sense of solidarity among code contributors.
There are going to be libertarians who work on or believe in open source because open source is free as is liberty and they don't want anyone telling them what they can and can't do with code.
There are going to be conservatives who work on or believe in open source because... ummm... well I'm sure they have their reasons too (leveraging free labour for world domination??? :-) ).
All kidding aside - when something is correct it doesn't matter what portion of the policial spectrum you choose to be in for you to recognize that its correct.
andre
- by john.mark October 29, 2008 12:08 AM PDT
- Matt,
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(12 Comments)If you're looking for a place to direct your ire - and it really appears that you are - it should probably go to the party that failed to nominate Mitt "Mittens" Romney. Now there's a repub worth voting for.
-JM