Drupal

powdermonkey brings us the welcome news that the US Department of Defense has positively OK'd Open Source software for use in its projects.

Here's the opening statement:

To effectively achieve its missions, the Department of Defense must develop and update its software-based capabilities faster than ever, to anticipate new threats and respond to continuously changing requirements. The use of Open Source Software (OSS) can provide advantages in this regard.

The memo's attachments outline a cogent case for OSS, which all software customers should take to heart. Here's a list of key points:

There are positive aspects of OSS that should be considered when conducting market research on software for DoD use, such as:

1. The continuous and broad peer-review enabled by publicly available source code supports software reliability and security efforts through the identification and elimination of defects that might otherwise go unrecognized by a more limited core development team.
2. The unrestricted ability to modify software source code enables the Department to respond more rapidly to changing situations, missions, and future threats.
3. Reliance on a particular software developer or vendor due to proprietary restrictions may be reduced by the use of OSS, which can be operated and maintained by multiple vendors, thus reducing barriers to entry and exit.
4. Open source licenses do not restrict who can use the software or the fields of endeavor in which the software can be used. Therefore, OSS provides a net-centric licensing model that enables rapid provisioning of both known and unanticipated users.
5. Since OSS typically does not have a per-seat licensing cost, it can provide a cost advantage in situations where many copies of the software may be required, and can mitigate risk of cost growth due to licensing in situations where the total number of users may not be known in advance.
6. By sharing the responsibility for maintenance of OSS with other users, the Department can benefit by reducing the total cost of ownership for software, particularly compared with software for which the Department has sole responsibility for maintenance (e.g., GOTS).

Gives new meaning to "Good enough for government work" :-)
Powdermonkey post

DoD PDF document

Following up on the news that whitehouse.gov has been migrated to Drupal, Tim O'Reilly comments on the O'Reilly Radar site.

Among other things, O'Reilly points out that having a high-profile target like this using OSS software validates the long-understood advantage of open source in the security arena. But there's more:

More than just security, though, the White House saw the opportunity to increase their flexibility. Drupal has a huge library of user-contributed modules that will provide functionality the White House can use to expand its social media capabilities, with everything from super-scalable live chats to multi-lingual support.
In many ways, this is the complement to the Government as Platform mantra I've been chanting in Washington. When you build a vibrant, extensible platform, others add value to the foundation you establish; when you join such a platform, you get the benefit of all those features you didn't have to develop yourself.

So is the White House actually creating a user community around their website, in the best Web 2.0 fashion? Well, not yet - right now there's no interactivity to speak of on the site, and no indication as to what the plans are.

O'Reilly post

AP news release, via Huffington Post

Drupal lead Dries Buytaert's comments

Drupal founder Dries Buytaert has a piece on his personal blog about ways in which Drupal is overcoming the hesitation of CIOs to abandon big expensive "enterpise" content management platforms, in favor of OSS solutions like Drupal. You know - the ones they spent, oh, say, $500K on the first year...?

Here's a list of reasons for picking Drupal, from the use case:

The decision for IMO to use Drupal came after an unsuccessful attempt to build out In-Fisherman.com with another CMS. The deciding factors for selecting Drupal were:

• Scalability - Drupal was perceived as the most scalable and extensible open source option.
• Cost - No licensing fees.
• Multi-site / multi-database architecture - Drupal’s flexible multi-site configuration would allow IMO to store content and user data in multiple databases for a single site. Multiple databases would keep distinct areas of the site operational in the event of database failure from server load. The user data is stored in its own database and the gear/angler/www sites are set-up to seamlessly pull user data from that separate database.
• Hosting - The expected traffic for the site demanded a low-cost enterprise level hosting environment. Drupal and the LAMP stack were a natural fit.
• Flexibility - IMO's previous CMS was inflexible, making it difficult to implement new and innovative features. Drupal’s modular framework, API and theme override capabilities made it the top choice.
• Theme customization - Drupal’s separation of presentation and business logic through the theme layer allowed the In-Fisherman.com UI to undergo significant revisions during and after development.
• Active development community - A fragile economy encouraged open source software vs. a proprietary vendor solution. IMO was looking for a community with solid leadership and momentum. In addition, the Mediacurrent offices were local to the project stakeholders and allowed for enhanced interaction.

Here's an end-user quote:

...it was important for us to implement a content management system that enables us to continually improve our sites without the constraint of vendor roadmaps and proprietary code. The transparency of Drupal’s source code and engaged developer community ensures that any deficiencies in the code are quickly discovered and remedied, new features can be developed as necessary, and we will always retain the flexibility to keep our sites on the cutting-edge.

Use case from Drupal.org

Dries' article