Could a greater adoption of open source software have prevented the current government shutdown?

[adelevie]

How?

[parkr]

I'd say the answer to this question depends most closely on what cause you attribute to the shutdown. If you think it had to do with understanding the wants and needs of the American people (with regard to the ACA and the Republicans' stubbornness in seeing its demise) then having a definitive vote through an open-source platform may have been advantageous in convincing our leaders that the American people support or don't support the ACA. That said, I think ideology, opportunity, group-think, special interests and stubbornness are to blame for the current shutdown, not the merits of a law or the "will of the American people."

[adelevie]

I'm seeing a lot of Big Concepts getting intertwined here in an odd way:

1. Maybe more "direct democracy" through online voting platforms could have some affect here, but that presupposes the issue is that members of Congress aren't effectively understanding the will of their constituents. I don't think this is the case, in fact I think the opposite is likely true--that this is very much driven by the will of constituents in certain districts.
2. Even if the issue was reading the political winds, what difference does it make if a "citizen voting platform" was open source? Open source is certainly good for many things (security, building better tools, etc), but why would a tally calculated by an open source tool be more persuasive to a Congressman than a tally calculated by closed source software?

If we took this question one level deeper, I think it's clear that adoption of open source has little to do with the shutdown. Maybe the shutdown could have been prevented if the government was more friendly to the GPL over the MIT License...

[benbalter]

No.