title: White House goes open source link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/white-house-goes-open-source/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 219 created: 2009/10/31 08:54:01 created_gmt: 2009/10/31 08:54:01 comment_status: open post_name: white-house-goes-open-source status: publish post_type: post

White House goes open source

Looks like its “mission accomplished” for open source advocates who helped elect the new administration in Washington. Tim O’Reilly has the details in a blog post, Thoughts on the Whitehouse.gov switch to Drupal.

Of course both the popular, and much of the “technical” press got some of the details wrong, but the bottom line is that the U.S. government is continuing to expand its use of open source software. According to Tim, in addition to the Drupal content management system (CMS), whitehouse.gov is now also running on Apache web servers, the MySQL database and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat’s Michael Tiemann has more to say on this over on his OSI blog, including an acknowledgment that Red Hat’s product is indeed being used as a server platform for the government site.

The main reason cited for the change was improved security. But there was certainly more to it than that, according to O’Reilly:

More than just security, though, the White House saw the opportunity to increase their flexibility. Drupal has a huge library of user-contributed modules that will provide functionality the White House can use to expand its social media capabilities, with everything from super-scalable live chats to multi-lingual support.

The Department of Defense has a page on using open source entitled simply “FOSS” (the common abbreviation for “Free Open Source Software”). Recently the DoD CIO’s office issued The Memo, a brief “clarification” of department policy encouraging the use of open source software.

More news about U.S. government adoption of open source can be found over at Open Source for America (OSFA).

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