Not worried. We have always found ways around the obstruction of information. We get better at it and they waste more effort with little success.

May seem like a stupid question, but are these silicon particles consumed during this process?

Not opening the source is extremely short-sighted. On one hand, the opposition (read republicans in this case) may be able to leverage the progress of Obama's campaign developers. However, third parties would also be able to leverage this software. This would aid the third (or forth, fifth) parties to gain visibility and thus choice for the American people. Opening the code would be a net positive for those that matter; the American people.

It was the coating on the ship, not the he that made it a disaster.

Yeah, on linux it was:
Day 1) Find autoexpect, leverage that with some bash/perl/python/tcl etc foo
Day 2) Done

I used remoting for some stuff, but for some reason, psexec just worked easier. Plus it was easier to specify a user on the command line. I know, I could have done it with config files but when I wanted to do just a one off dos command, it was just easier.

So, been down this EXACT road. I was doing Linux automation, was so effective was brought in to do Windows too - yea!
Anyway, tried the cygwin route... It went OK, but just not quite it.
Went the vbscript route for a while (pure hell), but could work with wmi and had the windows objects available.

Soon, I started writing console apps in C# to make the trickier stuff happen. The .Net framework made it all so easy.

My final set of tools came to be powershell (access to the .net framework, you can do almost anything), Systernals psexec (for running processes on remote machines), and basic vbscript .bat. I had it set up with a web interface so I could enter a dos command into a web interface and point it a machine. It would build the bat and run it on the remote machine and return the standard out. This allowed me to add IIS sites and app pools, install com components, install apps, run msunit tests, and basically do whatever I wanted to any machine on the domain. Took me a quarter to build, but worked well. I've moved on in the company, but my replacement is still using it.