Josh Carver sent me a Tweet about an article on The Verge discussing the "battle" over what should happen to the code developed for Barack Obama's campaign: should it be open sourced, as the developers wish, or kept private, as the democrats in charge of the campaign would like to see?

140 chars wasn't quite enough to reply with an answer worth reading. Here goes:

If we approach it from the perspective of "the software created to help Barack Obama improve his campaign, better reach voters, and win the election could be adapted and further developed to benefit future campaigns and benefit the public," there is almost no question about it: open sourcing the code would be best. Not only would it help future campaigns and keep the code fresh for upcoming races, but it would help the developers quite a bit. It would give them something to show for their efforts, and would make them more excited in the future to help with future campaigns (doing so, it should be pointed out, would likely benefit Democrats more positively than their wish to keep the code private).

But (putting on my cynical hat and throwing on an episode of No Agenda in the background), politics isn't about helping society or benefitting the people- it's about keeping the slaves happy and screwing the other guys to keep power*. In that perspective, why should they open source the code? Clearly they did something right. Their guy won, the other people's guy lost, and who's to say that their efforts didn't play a significant part?

Let's look at it realistically and fairly, though. Yes, they should open source it. Do they have to? No. Will they? Probably not, who knows. Even though it's built using open source tools, as long as all licenses are respected and any modified or redistributed code is licensed according to the licenses of the original project, they have no obligation to open source anything, and there should be no expectation for them to do so. Here's the bottom line: politicians aren't about respecting the hacker ethos- they are about getting more votes than the other guy. Plain and simple. Whatever helps them to do that is all that matters. So, developers putting in your time to help a campaign by contributing code, go into it knowing all your efforts are solely for that purpose and you will not get anything out of it (other than, you know, the possibility of your guy winning). And hey, if it actually benefits everyone and the code is put to other uses, just come out proud and pleasantly surprised.

*Okay, maybe that's a little harsh. It is my opinion, however, that politics are about keeping people down, whereas scientific progress is about empowering people to dream on, make a difference, and improve society. Society will improve in spite of politics. Please, no comments about why I am a cynic (or crackpot) and have no idea what I'm talking about- I already know (and freely admit) that I don't.