- Saturday, 21 November 2009
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Please do not read while the train is standing in the station
White House website goes open source
THE WEBSITE for the US President's mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a Washington, DC address that had to be rebuilt after the British burned it during the War of 1812, has been converted to open source.
The White House website at 'www.whitehouse.gov' has been switched to open source code in a bid to make the site more accessible.
White House new media director Macon Phillips told the Associated Press that open source was state-of-the-art technology and the US government is a participant in it.
Although the website looks the same, apparently the back-end is totally different and the existence of a large open source software community developing and supporting the code makes it more secure.
The changes to the website mean that the Administration can use more tools and interact better with the public.
While the software used for the website framework, called Drupal, is one of several web software schemes that are widely used and is not particularly unusual, the fact that the normally paranoid US government has shifted such a high-profile website to open source is a coup for free-as-in-freedom software advocates.
After all, if it is considered secure enough for the first website likely to be attacked in any international cyber war, it is probably good enough for ordinary business. µ
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Go Linux It will interesting to see if the rest the of feds follow suit.We have got save money somewhere after giving billions to all those thieves.
or propagate. The government should be in charge of building park benches, cleaning moats, and nothing else. A prat, but not the prat, is all it takes living above the shop.
"But on second thoughts... maybe not."
Help us get our duck houses in a row.
Cyberthropologists Wanted.
Now the Linux snobs will be in popping off about how much more secure it'll be now. The seem to miss or ignore all the high profile data breaches from so called secure Open Source data centers.
Don't get me wrong, I am glad to see any open source step forward, but the noise from the self proclaimed OS "upper crust" is getting a bit loud and obnoxious lately.
I would however, like to see some Photoshop artwork showing the president at his desk, with a penguin standing behind him, with a shotgun pointed at a terrorist trying to climb through the window. :)
Drupal is available for Windows, FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X... Who said they were using Linux? Nowhere in that article did it state the the site was going to start using Linux. Drupal is open source and is mult-platform.
Easy buddy. Dial it back a notch. It was a little sarcastic humor. I didn't say they were using Linux either, just that the MAC zealots and snobs (Does the shoe fit?) would use the story to take a swipe at M$.
Typed MAC when I should have typed Linux. Same difference. A zealot is a zealot.
The Macs are based of off a different kernel then Linux. Anyway if a person is a real artist they would use the GIMP instead of Photoshop under OS/2 or even under OS9/Level 2. Those were the good old days.