Check out how Obama saved $14.5 mn through open source

"Four more years. This happened because of you. Thank you," Obama tweeted soon after he defeated his Republican rival Mitt Romney in a closely contested 2012 US presidential poll.

Well, we are aware of the fact that the President of the United States of America and his tech team were all over the Internet embracing different kind of tools -may be from social media or from different online campaigns - to win the 2012 presidential elections, but many of us are not aware that open source software also played an important role during the US elections.

Yes, according to arstechnica.com, President Barack Obama's campaign underspent Romney's on IT products and services by $14.5 million, putting the money instead into building an internal tech team.

The report in Ars tech says, "The Obama campaign, all-inclusive, spent $9.3 million on technology services and consulting and under $2 million on internal technology-related payroll, while Romney campaign spent $23.6 million on outside technology services-most of it on outside "digital media" consulting and data management."

The report further added, the bottom line is that the Obama campaign's emphasis on people over capital and use of open source tools to develop and operate its sophisticated cloud-based infrastructure ended up actually saving the campaign money.

"Key in maximizing the value of the Obama campaign's IT spending was its use of open source tools and open architecture. Linux-particularly Ubuntu-was used as the server operating system of choice. "We were technology agnostic, and used the right technology for the right purpose," VanDenPlas, lead DevOps for Obama for America was quoted as saying by arstechnica.com.

"Someone counted nearly 10 distinct DBMS/NoSQL systems, and we wrote something like 200 apps in Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, and Node.js."

This is not the first time where US has embraced on open source technology.

It may be noted that in July 2009, Rock the Vote, a provider in technology solutions for election process in US, had announced that it has partnered with Open Source Digital Voting (OSDV) Foundation's TrustTheVote Project, to introduce new online voter registration tools based on open source technology.

So, Do you think open source also plays an important role as equivalent to proprietary software? Let us know your feed back...!