Red Hat CEO praises Obama openness, calls for ODF adoption

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst issued a statement on Monday applauding President Obama for bringing a culture of openness and participatory governance to the White House. According to Whitehurst, the Obama administration's commitment to transparency and inclusiveness reflects the same values that are found at the core of the community-driven open source software development model. He cites Republican media consultant Alex Castellanos, who recently described Obama as an "open source" president during a CNN segment.

Predictably, Whitehurst also takes the opportunity to encourage broader government adoption of open source software and open standards. He contends that the federal government has already saved a considerable sum of money by using open source technology and he suggests that millions more could be saved by expanding the government's open source strategy.

"Red Hat is excited that the Obama administration recognizes the value of open source beyond software. Open source principles are changing how we learn, how we share information, how developers create, and how companies do business. Now it has the opportunity to change our government," Whitehurst writes in his statement. "Open source can provide an effective way for government to cut costs and ensure open access to information. Lowering the costs of infrastructure will help provide resources for our government to focus on finding solutions to the challenges that lie ahead."

Whitehurst also broadly draws an analogy between open source software and user-contributed content sites such as YouTube, Wikipedia, and Facebook. All of these things, he says, are a representation of open source principles and demonstrate how open source can impact society and empower individuals. In his statement, Whitehurst also lauds the Obama administration for making itself accessible to citizens through the Change.gov and new Whitehouse.gov websites.

Although there is a strong case to be made for open source software adoption in government, Whitehurst's letter largely fails to make it. His statement looks like little more than a disingenuous attempt to ride on the coattails of the president by suggesting highly tenuous associations between his company's business model and the well-liked president. Whitehurst's highly ambiguous use of the phrase "open source" dilutes its meaning and undermines his core message of open source software advocacy.

His effort to connect "open source principles" with Whitehouse.gov and popular sites like Facebook and Twitter is misleading. He wants readers to think that the transparency and openness embodied by the Whitehouse.gov website is somehow an endorsement of the efficacy of the open source software development model. The site's own HTTP headers tell a slightly different story. Whitehouse.gov runs on Microsoft's proprietary IIS Web server and is built with Microsoft's ASP.NET development framework. Clearly, the Obama administration's IT staff doesn't need open source software to build a website that encourages governmental transparency.

Whitehurst's references to Twitter and Facebook seem similarly misguided. These popular websites do leverage open source software at various layers of their sophisticated technical infrastructure, but the services that they provide do not serve as an example of open source principles in action. Contrary to Whitehurst's contention that these sites allow us to exchange information freely, prominent figures in the free and open source software community have expressed concern about the fundamental lack of interoperability inherent in their design. Open Web advocates favor competing services like Identi.ca, which use open protocols to facilitate interoperability and federated communication.

Whitehurst's breathless adulation for Obama's commitment to openness is also a bit overwrought and, perhaps, premature. Although the new president has made many positive policy changes that have been welcomed by government transparency advocates, there are still major gaps in his supposed commitment to transparency and accountability. In fact, social media analyst Stowe Boyd recently launched an Unfollow Obama campaign on Twitter in protest of what he views as a failure to fulfill promises of transparency.

One area where I enthusiastically agree with Whitehurst is in his statement encouraging adoption of open standards, specifically the Open Document Format (ODF). Whitehurst says that ODF "keeps public information public" by ensuring that it is broadly accessible without encumbrances. Where he goes wrong, however, is in implying that this is inherently a value of open source.