White House opens Web site coding to public

Just found this, thought it was interesting.

www.msnbc.msn.com...


A snippit of the article states:

"WASHINGTON - A programming overhaul of the White House's Web site has set the tech world abuzz. For low-techies, it's a snooze — you won't notice a thing.

The online-savvy administration on Saturday switched to open-source code for www.whitehouse.gov — meaning the programming language is written in public view, available for public use and able for people to edit."


Can we say 'fishing expedition'? What a perfect way to locate the 'internet threats' and zero in on their locations.....Anyone that edits or uploads code to this platform is not very bright.

My recommendation to the OP is to at least understand what something means before publicly commenting on its alleged implications.

According to the press link provided, the wh is using Drupal, which is open source. That means that the source code to Drupal is freely shared, much like the source code for open office. However, opensource code has nothing to do with the actual information content of the website, just like the source code that makes up Open Office has nothing to do with what people actually write in the documents they create using Open Office.

It should be noted as well that while many developers contribute to the development of the product, the product is still deployed as specific stages of development (called releases) at which point the code base for that release is frozen. In other words, running open source Drupal on the wh server does not mean that the code on the wh server will be modified at any time by third parties out there.

There is nothing sinister or conspiratorial about open source, it's just surprising that a government organization used the uncommonly good sense to go open source.

plus most government computers (servers) run CentOS, a linux flavor that was originally developed for the military and has been hardened against most, not all, but most casual hack attacks..