The White House Chooses Open Source

Drupal for Content Management

Great news announced this week from our colleagues at Acquia, the commercial open source backers of the Drupal web content management tool. The White House’s web site, www.whitehouse.gov, has relaunched using Drupal. On his blog, Dries Buytaert, CTO of Acquia and original creator of Drupal, describes this news.

I have passionately asserted in a past post that the U.S. Government has a long way to go in catching other western governments in its conviction to use new technologies, especially open source software, to the benefit of every citizen (the minimum benefit of which is better using precious tax dollars). This news underscores the technological platform being created by Vivek Kundra, the new Federal Government CIO and his even newer counterpart, CTO Aneesh Chopra.

I have long admired Drupal as a project and as a tool set. The teams I’ve lead have built several substantial, commercial web sites using this tool. Most recently, Jaspersoft’s commercial web site has been re-built using Drupal and coming soon, our community web site will use Drupal for all Homepage-like content, making our management of these two sites simpler and less costly.

Building web sites using an open source content management system makes just as much sense as using any number of other widely available, highly-regarded open source software and tools, such as Linux, Apache/Tomcat, PHP, and MySQL. Just as Dries explains, the choice of Drupal amplifies the features, security, and cost effectiveness of not only this world-class content management tool, but of open source software in general.

Fortunately, I can report similar increased interest and use of Jaspersoft’s open source business intelligence platform throughout the U.S. Federal Government. In the past, I’ve written about our work with the NIH, DoD, and NASA/JPL. So much has happened since the launch of Open Source for America and our open letter to President Obama. Soon, I’ll be adding to this roster of Federal Government customers (of Jaspersoft's) with more prominent projects in high-profile agencies. Stand ready as Government 2.0 is readying for launch.

My congratulations to the Obama Administration and the White House team for taking an important step forward.

Brian Gentile

Chief Executive Officer

Jaspersoft