Ryan and others argue, because the Obama tech team built on top of open source code — code that has been shared publicly and can be “forked,” essentially edited, by anyone. “The things we built off of open source should go back to the public,” says Manik Rathee, who worked as a user experience engineer with OFA. The team relied on open source frameworks like Rails, Flask, Jekyll and Django. “We wouldn’t have been able to accomplish what we did in one year if we hadn’t been working off open source projects,” says Rathee.

via As Obama heads back to office, a battle rages over the tech that got him reelected | The Verge.

I think this is all kind of silly.  The code is probably not that novel.  I’d be more interested in simply learning more how they did it and I might be interested in their development process more than the actual code itself.  Although this team seemed to have done a good job, it was Obama who won the election — not the programmers or the program.  I find it funny that the non techie politicians want to keep all of this proprietary like the code itself has some sort of value.  I’m sure in 4 years this program will be so obsolete no one would think of using it.