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The politics of open source
July 02, 2007

Having done religion I thought I'd have a crack at politics. In February Rob Enderle suggested that Cuba's adoption of Linux would make it a political issue and that no US politician could now dare be associated with open source software.

I responded at the time that Enderle was fixating on an imaginary threat. It has now become clear how imaginary that threat is.

A recent survey of US Presidential candidates' campaign web sites indicated that more are running Linux than Windows. If that wasn't enough, now one of the candidates has even gone on record as favoring the use of open source software for voting machines.

As Dana Blankenhorn reports John Edwards told the Open Voting Consortium last week that it is his view that “To ensure security, these [voting] machines should be programmed with an open source code for complete transparency, and election results should be safeguarded by voter-verified paper records.”

While no other candidates have gone so far in endorsing open source, if you consider actions to speak louder than words a number of them (or at least their backroom staff) have voted in favour of open source.

Douglas Karr took a look at what operating system/application server the major candidates are running and found that:

48% are on Linux
43% Windows
9% FreeBSD

“I predict Linux will win the election,” he concluded.

Interestingly, there is a distinct difference between Democrat and Republican candidates:

Democrats
Linux 70%
Windows 20%
FreeBSD 10%

Republicans
Linux 31%
Windows 69%
FreeBSD 0%

There's been a suggestion of a shift towards open source in the houses of government in the UK recently, with the Conservative Party promising to promote open source if elected and the incumbent Labour Party releasing the code behind its new carbon footprint calculator under the General Public License.

I thought I'd take a quick look at how the UK political parties shape up (all details from Netcraft):

Labour.org.uk
Apache on Linux

Conservatives.com
Apache on NetBSD/OpenBSD

LibDems.org.uk
Apache on Windows 2003

SNP.org
Zope on Linux

PlaidCymru.org
Apache on Linux (moved from Windows today)

DUP.org.uk
Microsoft IIS on Windows 2003

SinnFein.ie
Apache on FreeBSD

SDLP.ie
Apache on FreeBSD (moved from Windows today)

UUP.org
Microsoft IIS on Windows 2000

RespectCoalition.org
Microsoft IIS on Windows 2003

Greenparty.org.uk
Apache on Linux

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Posted by Matthew Aslett on July 2, 2007 12:16 PM

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Comments

Interesting stuff Matthew! You prodded me in doing the same for Italian politics, see http://www.rabellino.it/blog/2007/07/02/the-politics-of-italian-open-source/

Posted by: Gianugo Rabellino on July 2, 2007 04:32 PM

I think that you'll find http://www.libdems.org.uk/ is the Liberal Democrats home page.

Posted by: Darren on July 4, 2007 05:23 AM

Oops, so it is. Post edited accordingly. Thanks Darren.

Posted by: Matthew Aslett on July 4, 2007 09:55 AM

umm, Democrats use
Linux 70%
Windows 10%
FreeBSD 10%
That's 90%... what does the remaining 10% use? DOS?

Posted by: Daniel on July 4, 2007 03:04 PM

No, my mistake again... That's 20% for Windows

Posted by: Matthew Aslett on July 4, 2007 03:07 PM

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The politics of open sourceJuly 02, 2007

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The politics of open source
July 02, 2007