Transatlantic Cable: Al Gore - the president of open source?

Some things may be different in the United States, but many things remain the same. Take, for instance, clueless politicians who latch onto concepts they don't really understand in a vain attempt to look clued up, but end up looking stupid.

In this case, I'm talking about Al Gore, the vice president of the US, who is currently gearing up his campaign for the presidential election in 2000. You see, Al fancies himself as a bit of a technology guru, and spends lots of his time hanging around Silicon Valley, schmoozing with the top people at companies like Netscape and Excite.

At a recent fundraising dinner in Silicon Valley ($10,000 a plate, if you were thinking of attending the next one), he invited the attendees to visit his Web site (at http://www.gore2000.org ) and "look in the source code. You'll find a secret message there from moi".

Sure enough, right at the top of the source code was a message from Al Gore: "Thanks for checking out our source code!" It then goes on to outline Gore's commitment to open source, and he invites people to help him out. "In the spirit of the open source movement, we have established the Gore 2000 Volunteer Source Code Project... We are very interested in developing content that takes advantage of open source software such as Linux. For starters, we are conducting a Gore 2000 Linux screensaver design competition..."

Hacked off

Now forgive me if I sound like a cynical bastard here, but Linux screensavers as a way to drum up political support? Is this really a good way for the potential leader of the most powerful nation in the world to persuade people to vote for him? Are the voters of Middle America going to be persuaded to vote Gore because of a screensaver that runs on an operating system (OS) they don't use? Are AOL users going to go for Gore because of a secret message hidden in the HTML of his site? No, of course not.

In truth, what Gore is really after here is attention. By claiming to be for open source, Gore is looking to jump on a bandwagon, to prove his high-tech credentials by finding the newest buzzword in the industry and claiming it as his own. And not surprisingly, it's backfired, with most people in the IT industry regarding it as a laughable attempt to gain publicity.

Furthermore, he's really missed the point of open source, the basis of which is taking other people's work and reusing it to create something new. Now this may sound like politics, but in open source circles you credit the original author, which is not something most politicians do well. And the timing of his announcement wasn't good - it only took people a few hours to realise that his Web site was running on a Microsoft server, although it has since been shifted to an Apache one.

Don't forget that Al Gore is also the man who claims to have invented the Internet. As one http://www.slashdot.org forum user put it, "If that's the case, maybe I could get a quick text file of the source code of the Internet? He wrote it after all, how big could it be?"

The land of the free

Of course, this shouldn't really come as a surprise. This is, after all, the nation that thrives on style over substance when it comes to, well, most things. This is the nation where money can buy more or less anything. Take, for instance, the group of workers at a Silicon Valley Internet service provider (ISP) who'd had enough of their current employer and figured out a good way to raise their profile in the job market. Instead of the usual discreet approaches to rivals, they decided to post an advert on the eBay auction site, offering their services as a complete team for the modest price of $3.2m. "Group formed major ISP presence in Silicon Valley/US and is now looking for other challenges and requires an opportunity with a major player" said the advert (which can still be found on the http://www.ebay.com site).

The auction didn't attract any bidders, but it seems to have either achieved its purpose or got all of them sacked - it was withdrawn a few days later. Or perhaps it was their salary demands that scared people off - $200,000 a year for the director and $190,000 a year for each of the five engineers. Plus, of course, benefits and a sign-on bonus...

* Richard Baguley is Silicon.com's US correspondent, located in Silicon Valley. He is the former deputy editor of Internet Magazine, the former editor of Internet Today and Amiga Shopper Magazine. He has also written for magazines like Mac Format, .Net and online services such as Wired News. He can be contacted at baggers@baggers.com