Technology wants to be free
Heh -- hat tip to
Slashdot for the link -- from
The Verge:
As Obama heads back to office, a battle rages over the tech that got him reelected
The tech team behind the 2012 Obama campaign has probably received more attention than any political programmers in history. A so-called "dream team of engineers from Facebook, Google and Twitter [who] built the software that drove Barack Obama�s reelection" were extolled in the press for bringing Silicon Valley strategies like Agile development to the normally hidebound process of a political campaign. In the post mortems that followed Obama�s victory, many credited the superiority of the Democrats� tech team and its famous Narwhal platform, in contrast to the failure of Mitt Romney�s digital efforts, with mobilizing the vote and winning crucial swing states.
But in the aftermath of the election, a stark divide has emerged between political operatives and the techies who worked side-by-side. At issue is the code created during the Obama for America (OFA) 2012 campaign: the digital architecture behind the campaign�s website, its system for collecting donations, its email operation, and its mobile app. When the campaign ended, these programmers wanted to put their work back into the coding community for other developers to study and improve upon. Politicians in the Democratic party felt otherwise, arguing that sharing the tech would give away a key advantage to the Republicans. Three months after the election, the data and software is still tightly controlled by the president and his campaign staff, with the fate of the code still largely undecided. It�s a choice the OFA developers warn could not only squander the digital advantage the Democrats now hold, but also severely impact their ability to recruit top tech talent in the future.
Geeks, even those who chose to swallow the
blue pill, want recognition for their brilliance and have a strict code of moral ethics when it comes to coding -- more:
The historic work the campaign was able to achieve in such a short time was made possible, Ryan and others argue, because the Obama tech team built on top of open source code � code that has been shared publicly and can be "forked," essentially edited, by anyone. "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. "We wouldn�t have been able to accomplish what we did in one year if we hadn�t been working off open source projects," says Rathee.
Posted by DaveH at January 22, 2013 10:00 PM