White House Website Goes Open Source
Here’s an interesting contrast between the GOP, which spent $1.4 million on a buggy, incomplete website redesign, and the Democratic White House, where they just launched a redesign of the site using the open source Content Management System (CMS), Drupal. (And it looks great.)
Publisher Tim O’Reilly has a good piece on it: Thoughts on the Whitehouse.gov switch to Drupal.
Yesterday, the new media team at the White House announced via the Associated Press that whitehouse.gov is now running on Drupal, the open source content management system. That Drupal implementation is in turn running on a Red Hat Linux system with Apache, MySQL and the rest of the LAMP stack. Apache Solr is the new White House search engine.
This move is obviously a big win for open source. As John Scott of Open Source for America (a group advocating open source adoption by government, to which I am an advisor) noted in an email to me: “This is great news not only for the use of open source software, but the validation of the open source development model. The White House’s adoption of community-based software provides a great example for the rest of the government to follow.”
John is right. While open source is already widespread throughout the government, its adoption by the White House will almost certainly give permission for much wider uptake.
Frank says: