Big news in the tech community - Whitehouse.gov has gone Open Source! And they're using my favorite open source platform, Drupal.

The Open Source approach allows faster innovation with lower costs (to the taxpayers, in this case) and better security. The site doesn't look any different, but because it is based on the popular Drupal platform, it now has the potential to leverage the genius of thousands of extremely bright developers within the open source community who are constantly innovating and tightening the underlying Drupal codebase.

So while I continue to have major concerns about proposed net neutrality and cybersecurity legislation, I have to applaud the Obama administration for taking this step - it has the potential to be a big one, and it opens up some really powerful opportunities for transparency, open data and citizen engagement... within an environment where they'll be held accountable to the developer community.

What's so great about Open Source?

Open Source 101
The Open Source Initiative defines Open Source as "a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in."

In other words, thousands of developers worldwide collaborate to develop different chunks of software that integrate with each other to form a larger system that can meet a wide variety of needs. Part of the deal is that when a developer uses source code that is Open Source, they agree to make the source code of whatever they develop publicly available so it can be used and modified by others.

It's kind of like a pot luck dinner - I bring my jello salad (yes, I'm from the midwest and we do crazy things with jello), you bring your crab and artichoke dip, someone else brings brownies... and you end up with a smorgasbord of tasty treats. You can then sample the things you like and skip the things you don't, and each person ends up with a meal that's customized to their specific needs, without having to cook each thing on their own.

To take the metaphor a little further, let's say my jello salad was pretty good on it's own, but someone has an idea to make it better, so they take a piece and add marshmallows. Someone else thinks it would be cool if it was a little saltier, so they add crushed pretzels. And suddenly, my jello salad has several new iterations that help even more people accomplish their, er, eating goals. And maybe someone likes the idea of my jello salad, but thinks they could do something totally different with it - they can take my recipe home and play with it, and bring their creation to the next pot luck.

The result of using Open Source is that you have more robust software with shorter development time and lower cost to develop.

So, I can just re-create Whitehouse.gov if I want to?
Well... not yet. They're *using* Open Source, which is a great first step. To comply with the Drupal license, they'll also need to *publish* the source code and any modifications they made. So far, I'm not seeing that anywhere on the site -- and I'm not sure when we'll see it.

What I hope to see in the future is a focus on using Open Source and Open Data to unleash the genius of the Open Source community and see what happens. DC did something similar last year through their "Apps for Democracy" contest, with amazing results.

Random Open Source questions I often get:

So, do Open Source developers work for free?
It's a common misconception that just because the code is made available to the public, developers are donating their time. Typically, a company will hire or contract a developer to develop a custom module or website for them, and the developer will use Open Source to leverage the existing framework, then customize it to meet the needs of the employer.

What about security?
Actually, security is tighter when you have thousands of people hacking away at the same code. It's constantly being tightened and improved.

More information:

Open source software (OSS) is computer software for which the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that meets the Open Source Definition or that is in the public domain. This permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified forms. It is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner.

From "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond:
The essay's central thesis is Raymond's proposition that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" (which he terms Linus's Law): the more widely available the source code is for public testing, scrutiny, and experimentation, the more rapidly all forms of bugs will be discovered. In contrast, Raymond claims that an inordinate amount of time and energy must be spent hunting for bugs in the Cathedral model, since the working version of the code is available only to a few developers.

From The Washington Post:
The online-savvy administration on Saturday switched to open-source code for http://whitehouse.gov- meaning the programming language is written in public view, available for public use and able for people to edit.

"We now have a technology platform to get more and more voices on the site," White House new media director Macon Phillips told The Associated Press hours before the new site went live on Saturday. "This is state-of-the-art technology and the government is a participant in it."

White House officials described the change as similar to rebuilding the foundation of a building without changing the street-level appearance of the facade. It was expected to make the White House site more secure - and the same could be true for other administration sites in the future.

"Security is fundamentally built into the development process because the community is made up of people from all across the world, and they look at the source code from the very start of the process until it's deployed and after," said Terri Molini of Open Source for America, an interest group that has pushed for more such programs.

Having the public write code may seem like a security risk, but it's just the opposite, experts inside and outside the government argued. Because programmers collaborate to find errors or opportunities to exploit Web code, the final product is therefore more secure.

For instance, instead of a dozen administration programmers trying to find errors, thousands of programmers online constantly are refining the programs and finding potential pitfalls.

It will be a much faster way to change the programming behind the Web site. When the model was owned solely by the government, federal contractors would have to work through the reams of code to troubleshoot it or upgrade it. Now, it can be done in the matter of days and free to taxpayers.

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