Whitehouse.gov Now Using Drupal

I try but haven’t been too successful at refraining from getting too deep into politics (I sure do miss talking about Ron Paul), but when politics and technology come together I especially can’t help myself.  For the first time it appears we have a technologically savvy President who is fighting for net neutrality and whos media team is now using an open source platform for his whitehouse.gov website.  On the Buytaert.net website Dries Buytaert (the original creator and project lead for the Drupal open source web publishing platform) says the following about the decision for whitehouse.gov to go open source:

“First of all, I think Drupal is a perfect match for President Barack Obama’s push for an open and transparent government — Drupal provides a great mix of traditional web content management features and social features that enable open communication and participation. This combination is what we refer to as social publishing and is why so many people use Drupal. Furthermore, I think Drupal is a great fit in terms of President Barack Obama’s desire to reduce cost and to act quickly. Drupal’s flexibility and modularity enables organizations to build sites quickly at lower cost than most other systems. In other words, Drupal is a great match for the U.S. government.

Second, 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. It takes time to understand these things and to bring this change, so I congratulate the Obama administration for taking such an important leadership role in considering Open Source solutions.”