Not the kind you might first think of – I mean actual political party type politics trying to use Open Source one way or the other in rhetoric.
Take a quick step outside and see how some people see Open Source in relation to ”real” politics.
Slate: Bizarro World Sends Reporter to Earth
There is a truly bizarre article at Slate by Chris Wilson entitled “Message Error” where Mr. Wilson attempts to show that the White House selection of Drupal for its home page somehow reflects the political failings of President Obama.
It’s a tour-de-force of ignorance and painfully strained similes set off especially nice by the disclaimer at the bottom of the article:
(Disclosure: Slate sister sites The Big Money, DoubleX, and The Root run on Drupal. The author is not directly involved with any of those sites or their content management.)
Imagine that.
Now I’m no great fan of Drupal, but guess what: All CMS suck. Robust content management is a complicated problem and every solution I’ve ever tried has good points and bad points. That’s why there are 8,792 different CMS alternatives with a new one being created each week.
Christian Science Monitor: Shallow but Revealing
“Michael Moore ignores capitalism’s blessings” is a much better article, not that I necessarily agree with the politics behind it, but simply because it wasn’t apparently written by someone who played with liquid mercury throughout their childhood.
One of the most interesting aspects of this article is that the author is holding up Open Source as a success of Capitalism and good-old-fashioned American gumption, which is quite a contrast from the usual anti-American / Communism brush that critics usually love to pull out.
Here’s the most relevant bit from that article; despite an understandably shallow view of Open Source, it also shows that even non-Subject Matter Experts are beginning to grok the basics of why Open Source is so darn successful:
In fact, many public-domain innovations have developed into their own financially sustainable system. Much of the Internet is run by patent-free “open source” software. Open source permits anyone to modify a program, as long as their modifications are made publicly available.
As some open-source projects reach millions of individual contributors, financial assistance is needed to pay for websites and data storage. Technology megacorporations, such as Cisco, happily sponsor open-source software; it not only gives them great publicity, but ensures access to software they find more efficient than commercial products.
I’m not beating up on the author when I call his view shallow – I’m sure any reader here can spot the same errors that I can. The point is that this gentleman has a basic and positive understanding of Open Source, and wants to use it as an example to bolster his argument.
That’s a long way from having to convince people you aren’t some anti-capitalist communist zealot hippie that wants to destroy the economy with Free Software.
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