White House goes open source
The Obama team campaigned partially on technology matters and have kept more than a little of their attention there. Now they have revamped the White House Web site and have done it using open source!
For those of you that are wondering, open source is an approach to the design, development, and distribution of software, offering practical accessibility to a software’s source code. That is to say, the source code for the application or site that you see can be downloaded and edited by any programmer, though for their own purposes; a member of the public cannot, for example, download the WhiteHouse.gov site, change all the names, and put it back up in a changed form. They can, however, download the software and adapt the code for their own purposes, or add to the code to improve it.
The administration is excited about the move to open source. For example, White House new media director Macon Phillips said “We now have a technology platform to get more and more voices on the site. This is state-of-the-art technology and the government is a participant in it.” It is likely that the move was made as a part of an effort to make the White House (and other government sites) more secure. As long as they were changing anyway, the White House Web team decided to also go with open source software, according to an AP story.
Terri Molini of Open Source for America said “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.” Molini’s organization is an interest group that has pushed for more open source programs. It is important to note that having the public write code may seem like a security risk, but it’s just the opposite, according to experts both inside and outside the government. They argue that because programmers collaborate to find errors or opportunities to exploit Web code, the final product is therefore more secure.
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