White House Website Switches To Open Source

Falc0n writes "WhiteHouse.gov has gone Drupal. After months of planning, says an Obama Administration source, the White House has ditched the proprietary content management system that had been in place since the days of the Bush Administration in favor of the latest version of the open-source Drupal software. Dries Buytaert reflected on this, adding: 'this is a clear sign that governments realize that Open Source does not pose additional risks compared to proprietary software, and furthermore, that by moving away from proprietary software, they are not being locked into a particular technology, and that they can benefit from the innovation that is the result of thousands of developers collaborating on Drupal.'"

Clearly

[Chelloveck]

this is a clear sign that governments realize that Open Source does not pose additional risks compared to proprietary software

Huh. Now to me, this is a clear sign that they hired a new web guy who happens to have experience with and a preference for Drupal. I don't think there's a necessarily a political statement here.

Re:High profile target and popular CMS'

[Kifoth]

You're assuming that the site's pages aren't served via a third party 'dumb' caching server, with the actual Drupal server locked down and disconnected from the internet.

Open Source Education IT

[micromegas]

Hopefully this will drive a push to utilize open source in other aspects of government. Specifically secondary education. School districts across the country are locked in symbiotic dependency to profit driven computing / IT services and systems. Linux offers a robust full service option but gets NO (very little) attention from the department of education. DOE, Please support those of us who are trying to save money with open source in the schools!

Re:High profile target and popular CMS'

[lawpoop]

...with the actual Drupal server locked down and disconnected from the internet.

How does the caching server get the original cache? Do you connect the actual server at some point, clear the cache, and let it answer requests, or do you push a cache?

Re:Socialist Software

[Monsuco]

My first reaction to seeing this article was how long it will take for Fox News and friends to declare open source software as socialist and how comrade Obama has taken jobs away from hard working capitalist programmers. It's really not a stretch given their track record.

foxnews.com's server runs on Linux according to Netcraft.