Since I've lived my entire voting life in California, I've grown quite used to not having my vote matter in the selection of my party's candidate for President. California's primary used to be in June of each presidential election year, but by June, voters in the other states had already selected the nominee.

This year was different.  California moved its primary to February 5, and for the first time,  my vote counted.  As evidence of this, I received my first piece a mail a few weeks ago from the Obama campaign asking for my vote (and not just my money.)  The ironic thing is that in every other race where my vote didn't matter I had a firm opinion about who to vote for.  This week—when my vote mattered—I was undecided until the end.  I reminded myself of the Devo song "Freedom of choice":

Freedom of choice
Is what you got
Freedom from choice
Is what you want.

Perhaps it's should be the theme song for Democratic Party voters who can't seem to make up their collective minds as Obama wins one state, and then Clinton wins the next.

It may seem like a stretch, but this Devo theme song could also apply to many organizations as they consider their future use of open source technology.  In the 2007 Campus Computing Survey, Kenneth Green comments on the "affirmative ambivalence" of U.S. universities as they consider Open Source applications. No one likes to be locked into a single vendor (freedom FROM choice), but they're ambivalent about moving toward freedom OF choice.

By the way, if my 9- and 13-year-old kids are any indicator, Obama has the youth vote locked up.  My third grader said they held a vote in his class of 17. Obama won with 14, Hilary 3 and McCain 0.