BSD-powered Obama ‘08
Douglas Karr at the Marketing Technology blog has an interesting post about the web servers the election candidates for the U.S. in 2008 run.
Hillary runs Windows 2003, for example, while Guiliani trusts his website to a CentOS+Apache install. An exception seem to be Barrack Obama and C. Todd, who are the only ones to run FreeBSD on their webservers.
The percentage difference between Linux/Apache (48%) and Windows/IIS (43%), seems to reflect the Internet not too badly (which is about 50% Apache vs. 35% IIS), but when you look at the two parties, there is a much more clear bias:
It’s fascinating to me that the Dems are predominantly Open Source… except for Hillary Clinton and the Republicans are predominantly Microsoft with the exception of Ron Paul, Jim Gilmore, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney.
I wonder what makes Republican candidates go so strongly for closed source products, but I’ll leave this up to your speculations 
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When I look at the hosting companies, I don’t recognize many names — only one came to sight: Republican candidate Jim Gilmore gets his Linux box from 1&1 Internet, Inc., a subsidiary of 1 und 1, one of Germany’s largest internet companies who have big facilities in my university town Karlsruhe. /me waves from here.
Will this knowledge influence where the average geek’s makes their cross on the ballot? Probably (or rather, hopefully) not. Yet it is interesting to see what technologies the candidates trust into. Now I’d only like to find out which browser they are using. But this will likely remain unresolved forever…
I doubt any of the candidates know or care which OS their websites are hosted on or which server software it uses. Some of them probably don’t know what a website is in the first place. For political leanings relating to OS choice, look to their tech teams and see if they share their employer’s ideology.
True, that’s pretty much what I was trying to say with the “hopefully” in the text
And yeah, if they are even remotely similar to German politicians, they have trouble even remembering their own web address, let alone ever having visited their own page.
Still it is not entirely impossible that there may be an affinity of the candidates’ teams towards hiring specific companies (who have possibly helped somebody else in an earlier campaign), which in turn tend towards one or the other technology. But that’s such a long span that I decided to abstain from deeper speculations in that direction
True, but open-source is definitely more of a left ideology. It’s not capitalistic, favoring the rich, or traditional; therefore, Republicans should technically hate it.