US Department of Defense and White House Choose Open Source

• White House website switched to Drupal
• Department of Defense issued memorandum about OSS benefits
• Department of Defense open sources more than 1 million lines of code

The tech-savvy US administration decided to switch http://www.whitehouse.gov to open source content management system Drupal. This step was considered highly relevant and important from the open source community. The official announcement reported that "the programming language is written in public view, available for public use, and able for people to edit." Debugging and upgrading the site's code "now...can be done in the matter of days and free to taxpayers"

White House new media director Macon Phillips confirmed that security was one of the main reasons to switch to Drupal.

The Department of Defense seems to be interested in open source as well, in a recent memorandum (PDF) issued back on October 16th by David M. Wennergren, deputy CIO for the DoD. Wennergren says that the "positive aspects of OSS should be considered when performing research for its use in the DoD. Some positive aspects are: public code, unrestricted modifications, minimal reliance on any one vendor, no restriction on the nature of the use and no licensing costs.

DoD is also collaborating with the open source community and it recently open-sourced a human resources application that has over a million lines of code.