The White House: Open-Source Drupal Developer?

[RoyGBiv]

Okay, now this is exceptionally cool. It had already been widely reported that the Obama White House has embraced open-source, but I was not aware that they were more than users. Not only are they implementing open source options they are also developing and plugging that effort back into the open source community. This is the kind of hopey-changey that really works for me.

The White House: open-source Drupal developer?
By Nate Anderson | Last updated April 22, 2010 11:39 AM

Call it a sign of the times: not only is the Obama White House using plenty of open-source software, its technology team is contributing back to the community.

Yesterday, the Senior Advisor to the CIO of the Executive Office of the President, Dave Cole, announced that his team was contributing three new pieces of code to the Drupal content management system, which powers the White House website.

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/04/the-white-houseopen-source-drupal-developer.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

[Cha]

1. Thanks, Biv..I might not understand the

technical side but the results sound very welcome.

"•Accessibility: We take very seriously our obligation to make sure WhiteHouse.gov is as accessible as possible and are committed to meeting the government accessibility standard, Section 508. As part of that compliance, we want to make sure all images on our site have the appropriate metadata to make them readable on by screen reading software. To help us meet this, while making it easier to manage the rich photos and video content you see on our site, we've developed "Node Embed."

[NYC_SKP]

2. A simple way to understand Open Source:

Without being too technical:

Imagine if school textbooks were all online and people could share and revise independently and/or collectively, leaving the originals intact and available.

Imagine any Microsoft program legal and free to modify and share, with attribution.

How much better and available might textbooks become?

How much better and available might Microsoft programs become?

It goes something like that, except with computer code, software, things like that.

A version of it allows people to develop iPhone apps by becoming a developer for a small fee and working with Apple code.

It's a model of intellectual property rights and innovation that allows greater freedom and more rapid advancements without keeping people from earning a buck.

Originally about computer code, it seems to be extending in spirit to a number of endeavors and fields: arts, literature, music, invention.

Here's a great page: http://opensource.com/

At least this is what I think when someone says, "Open Source".

Techies and others may have different definitions.

:patriot:

[RoyGBiv]

3. That's a good way of looking at it ...

There's another extremely important aspect to open source:

The code is "open."

That is, anyone can look at it, see what it does, and evaluate it. This is would, in other words, be perfect for something like, say, voting machines ...

[Cha]

5. The only way to do it if it's online

voting!

[Cha]

4. Brilliant!..Thank you for explaining it so intricately,

SKP.

And, I hope TPTB never are able to take away our internet.

[quiet.american]

6. This is very cool. nt

[Hutzpa]

7. How I wish to get a pm from them.

just wishful thinking thats all, nothing to see here. :evilgrin:

I find joomla to be ever so amazing just like Drupal.