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Will Obama be an open source president?

Last night during CNN's election coverage, after it was clear that Obama would become the country's 44th president, pundit Alex Castellanos wondered aloud whether the government under Barack Obama would take on some of the grass roots flavor that marked the President-Elect's campaign.

I didn't see the comment live, but was directed to the YouTube clip I've embedded here through the Twitter stream of my pal Ken VanDine, of (relative) rPath and Foresight Linux fame.

I'm not accustomed to seeing accurate accounts of open source concepts in the mainstream media—even the usually very sharp Malcolm Gladwell demonstrated his lack of understanding of the topic in what was a promising New Yorker acticle on food product development a couple years back.

Still, I found Castellanos' remarks more or less on target. He called out Eric Raymond's seminal free and open source essay, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," and contrasted the traditional, top-down, "cathedral" style of government to the distributed, self-organizing "bazaar" style that Castellanos sees in Obama's approach so far.

I suppose we'll begin to see in the year to come.

 

For more info: If you're interested in what open source is all about, the Cathedral and the Bazaar is an excellent (and fairly short) read. I suggest you check it out. What's more, if you're short on idle chit chat, I invite you to follow me on Twitter.
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SF Technology Examiner

Jason Brooks is executive editor of eWEEK Labs, and has been ...

Comments

  • guzman 3 years ago
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    we can only wait and see if Change is going to come about with Obama's administration team. why is everybody jumping out of their skin wondering what's going to happen. he's not in the White House yet, you know.

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