Drupal, as I’m sure you are all well aware, is what powers mndaily.com as well as an ever-increasing number of other websites including blogs, news sites and even corporate websites. Well, now it appears that the White House has made the switch as well.

Of course, this is a big milestone for the open source movement, as Drupal is an open source content management system. Son (the Online Manager here at the Daily) has written an informative blog post about how the Daily uses Drupal over at CoPress. The Associated Press has a wonderfully uninformative and inept article about the White House’s switch to "open-source." (those quotes were theirs, not mine) But they somewhat get to the point, which is that the software which now powers the website is essentially written by thousands of different people in collaboration, and that the government’s acceptance of open source software is pretty important. It helps legitimize what some people may percieve as unsecured and buggy, and what many makers of proprietary software try to vilify.

It was a pleasant surprise to find out that other goverment organizations at the national level had already been using it, as mentioned in this article by the lead developer of Drupal, Dries Buytaert. I think it’s great that the White House has switched to Drupal.