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White House goes open source with Drupal

By Sean Michael Kerner on October 26, 2009 9:46 AM

From the 'Open Government' files:

WhiteHouse.gov, the official website for the President of the United States is now based on open source technology.

Dries Buytaert, the founder of the Drupal open source content management system has announced that WhiteHouse.gove is now a Drupal site.

This is a big deal, though regular users will not notice a difference.

Drupal has emerged over the last few years as the leading open source CMS in the world. It's founder Dries Buytaert a bona fide open source rock star. Organizations big and small including Mozilla, NASA and now the White House use Drupal.

The move by the White House means a few things to me about the direction of the Obama Administration and also about Drupal itself.

For the new President, he has made numerous commitments to have an open government. With the new Drupal powered WhiteHouse.gov not only is the content open, but so is the underlying code that delivers the content. Can you get more open than that?

For Drupal, it means a very high profile site that will, by virtue of the open source model, actually contribute enhancements back to the global open source Drupal community.

No doubt, the government's security experts (and hackers alike) will test whitehouse.gov in an aggressive manner. Any improvement (or flaws) would be contributed back to the community and benefit millions of users, not just whitehouse.gov.

To my knowledge, this is the most public adoption of open source technology by the new U.S administration in a very public facing way with its primary website. Open Source clearly isn't just for hobbyists anymore.

The timing of the WhiteHouse.gov Drupal move is also quite interesting. Drupal 7 is due to be released soon, which adds all sorts of large enterprise features. With the Whitehouse.gov deployment now, I'd expect that other government agencies will take a closer look at Drupal for their own uses and with a new release on the way that can handle multiple site administration and management, the timing is very good.

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