Yesterday I was just roaming around the “interwebz” when I came across a poll asking which US presidential candidate is most likely to support open source. This intrigued me. I decided to do a little bit of research into the issue so I could report it here. Now this is not me putting my political beliefs on top of my Linux (and open source) soap box. This is me finding facts (and opinions) and drawing a fairly simple conclusion. It was also a chance to do a little digging.

The Facts
The first thing I usually do when attempting to link open source to a person or company is go to Netcraft and find out what their sites are run on. Here are the results:

www.barackobama.com
OS: Linux Domain Server: PWS/1.3.28 Registry: GoDaddy IP Address: 66.114.49.174 Average uptime: 54 days

www.johnmccain.com
OS: Linux Server: IIS 6 Domain Registry: GoDaddy IP Address: 72.21.91.132 Average uptime: N/A

Okay so we can assume both candidates are running Windows servers in a VM on Linux. Of course that can’t be placed on the shoulders of the candidates. But it is interesting to know anyway.

Now let’s move on to see where they stand.