Will Obama be an open source president?

November 5, 2:46 PMSF Technology ExaminerJason Brooks

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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.