Slashdot Mirror
White House Website Switches To Open Source
Falc0n writes "WhiteHouse.gov has gone Drupal. After months of planning, says an Obama Administration source, the White House has ditched the proprietary content management system that had been in place since the days of the Bush Administration in favor of the latest version of the open-source Drupal software. Dries Buytaert reflected on this, adding: 'this is a clear sign that governments realize that Open Source does not pose additional risks compared to proprietary software, and furthermore, that by moving away from proprietary software, they are not being locked into a particular technology, and that they can benefit from the innovation that is the result of thousands of developers collaborating on Drupal.'"
Are you a troll, naive or stupid?
A CMS is required if you want content to be updatable by non-programmers, which is almost always a very requirement on larger corporates pages.
A CMS will also allow versioning of content, making it easy to publish new content at specific points in time.
A better question is why so many practically static web sites use online content management systems. Is it just for convenience? Lack of thought? A life content management system on the server is a serious security liability. Many web sites could just as well use an offline CMS and push the data to the server when an update is made. A typical web server can handle orders of magnitude more visitors when there is only static content. Even if you aggressively cache the CMS output, that still leaves the security aspect. I guess it takes a Slashdotting / Digg effect before most authors realize that having a web site which can't handle 10 concurrent visitors is rather pointless.
The problem with using Drupal for the White House is that it's a popular CMS and has lots of people looking for exploits and vulnerabilities. The second a proof of concept piece of code or an easy exploit is discovered, a few thousand script kiddies will decend to get their 15 minutes of fame.
I'm not sure how Drupal fares with bugs and patching speed (I know Wordpress seems to get some high profile holes discovered) but even if all vulns are patched before someone takes advantage of it, you're still going to need an admin who's going to be constantly alert to patching it.
I'm not arguing against closed source vs open, more about popular vs obscure.
Businesses have come to accept the limitations of software, and will often adjust the way they do things to fit in with whatever the software requires, sad but true.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
do you write you own operating system?
As stated in the article, this wasn't done to earn your praise.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
"It's quite a sad state of affairs when moving to one of the most common and widely used back-ends for a website is considered "a significant step forward"."
Bullshit - it's not a "step" anywhere.
This is ONE part of the government changing ONE system over to open source. That's it. The whole "since the Bush Administration" comment is a red herring:
a) Drupal only went Open Source in 2001. "Hey, it's time to update the Whitehouse.gov back end, and there's this new cool thing that just got released. It's maintained by a bunch of enthusiasts, and has no support, but I think it's a great idea!" "Perkins, go back to trolling for porn."
b) Does anyone really think the president in ANY administration gives a rats ass about the back-end of the website? Remember, Bush was ridiculed for not even using email, but somehow it's his policy that only proprietary software be used for invisible parts of the website? Likewise, Obama was a lawyer, "community activist", professor, and politician. Which one of those would make him care about this?
I'm more than happy another Open Source effort has been used for a high profile installation. But please - this isn't "Change", or even a policy change, or even an operations change from the White House point of view. This is changing from "Tide" to "Bold" to wash the Presidential underwear.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
The new guy does not get to just through any random software into a government system with no oversight...
Palm trees and 8
The top of the government and especially the president are HR people first and foremost. They don't do much personally, but act through the agents they select, rely on their judgement and trust them to condense issues of importance for them. Sure, they also get to make some decisions, but they decide based on the information fed to them and the decisions are broad, policy decisions in most cases.
The point is, they didn't make a policy decision that "zomg, F/OSS ftw!", but they hired the guy who hired the guy who hired the guy who hired the web guy and the web guy seems competent enough to pick a F/OSS solution.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
theres alot of good reasons people use cms... and let me try and use your own words... say you wanted a website that looked like cisco's.
In a CMS, (such as drupal)... heres who does what:
1) designer writes a theme for the website (to give it the look)
2) content producers write the pages
3) codes do the bits the cms doesn't already do.
The point is, the CMS gives you alot to begin with without limiting you, sure you could code a website from scratch but something as powerfull as drupal is going to take a long time. You may not need everything drupal does so you can cut that down a bit. But ultimately you'll end up with something that allows people to do their jobs (i.e. content producers to write pages). Drupal CMS is also especially good at being extended (and there are virtually no limits that I can think of). So rather then writing a whole heap of code to do your website, your coders just write what they need to extend the CMS - "dang, drupal doesnt do rsa based two factor auth, we're going to have to code it in" as apposed to "ok, lets get started on coding a website - quick grab 15 people who know architecture".
So when you write your own code, you've written a CMS. But you just passed one up because it was too heavy-weight...
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Maybe the parent wished to be modded as funny. What happened along the years is that CMS products have been turned into commodities. The White House recognized that and switched the investment into the service of updating the contents. Optimizing the way one spends money looks a basic precept of capitalism to me, very American.
If some of the people who post here were as smart as they think they are, they'd figure out:
* Whitehouse.gov is not running Drupal on a ten-dollar shared server at GoDaddy.com.
* Building and maintaining a large, continuously updated website is not something you do in a weekend with Notepad, a giant bag of Cheetos, and a case of diet Coke.
* Any Drupal project of this scale involves layers of extremely high-performance caching and multiple firewalls.
* The site's administrative tools aren't available from the outside. (This is not difficult to implement.)
* Life does not begin and end with your personal favorite programming language, database server, etc., or with the boundaries of your parents' basement.
* Security reports are reports of vulnerabilities that have been fixed, not vulnerabilities that lie in wait to ambush your site. A properly run open-source project has a documented process for handling security issues.
I don't know any details of the site's technical architecture beyond the obvious, but it's blazingly fast. My bet is that when you hit the site, you're pulling completed pages out of RAM on a customized and hardened Varnish, but that's just a guess. The HTTP headers identify the server technology as "White House."
Yes, but I don't want Whitehouse.gov doing that. Allowing feedback on the high profile website is STUPID and ignorant.
Apparently, allowing feedback attracts the stupid and ignorant.
"Both of those things can be accomplished on your own code too"
Yes, of course. And do you know how the internal app you developed so to allow non-programmers to update content, so PHBs can review the content prior to go public, so you can version contents and pre stablish the date it will go alive, etc. will be called? It will be called a "Content Management System".
So in the end you won't avoid the CMS you'll just develop your own internal one: reinventing the wheel, at a cost, and probably worse.
First off, most leaders of the left wing imagine a future where scarcity is the norm, largely because they see the consumption of natural resources by the West as unethical in a larger world view. In their eyes, Americans already have "too much" and therefor should have to make due with less. This faux-conservatism, coupled with the right wing's stupid devotion to "free trade", is the underlying cause of this current economic crisis. It is that people want more stuff, resources are capped by environmental and ideological considerations, so, prices of goods are shooting up and people have less. Demand falls off, and unemployment shoots up. You add in free trade, and take away America's advantage in energy prices and expose our disadvantage in labor, and the country is totally fucked up.
It's pretty simple, actually.
Let's just think this through for a minute. Let's say that instead of having to borrow or raise taxes to have national health care, the USA simply turned around and issued permits to drill in ANWR and off the coasts. Instead of scraping to come up with 900B to pay for it, we would have that money coming in from ANWR alone, without a tax increase. Let's say for a minute that we build nuclear power plants everywhere, and lowered the price of energy to something like the 2 cents per kwh it is to operate a nuclear plant. Everyone would have effectively a 20% raise because of the energy savings not only for themselves but in the cost of every product or service that they buy, and that in turn would lower the price of medicine. If gasoline were a dollar a gallon, and electric bills not more than $20 a month, and food was cheap as well, everyone would feel pretty darned rich. Consumers would spend, tax revenues to the government would go up, and you could have an administration that throws national health care on the table coupled with a modest tax cut.
Bottom line is, regardless of whether you want to have the government doling out the goodies, or get yourself a tax cut, or even a combination of both, the most effective thing the government could do to do that would be to say screw the environmentalists and get cheap energy, no matter what. Energy -is- wealth, and the more wealth you have, the more stuff you can swing.
If everyone felt rich, than putting a national health care plan would be no big deal.
This is my sig.
It's not necessarily a bad thing. Yes, sometimes it cuts off new and creative ideas. Often, those are bad ideas, and everybody else is doing it the regular way for a reason.
This is especially true when a business is getting outside of its domain. If you're the best bottle-maker or book-binder on the block, do that. But your accounting and web site is almost certain to be identical to any other businesses, and crafting roll-your-own accounting or web management software specialized to your thing is quite likely the wrong thing.
Not always, but I've found too many businesses err on the Not Invented Here side.
Not only that, but using Drupal means you have a built-in security/programming team, constantly updating, improving, looking for bugs, etc. If you write your own software, YOU have to maintain it, by yourself. Are you as good as the Drupal devs? (I know I'm not)
does this even offset a Administration which takes all the bad habits of the last and compounds them with super sized bills that no one gets to review and a good dose of intimidation against any who speak up?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
With all due respect, are you a web developer?
For starters, a well-developed CMS and some competent IT people can produce a site every bit as quick as a static HTML site, because that's exactly what they'll be serving up with good server-side caching. Any "weight" in the backend is more than offset by the increased ease with which content can be updated.
Moreover, a CMS allows non-technical people to be involved in the process. Most likely, people from the press and communications offices are going to be the ones in charge of the content on this website, and it's not at all unreasonable to assume that most of them aren't going to be any good with HTML.
And why should they be? CMS is exactly what it says it is -- a content management system, letting people focus on content by hiding away the markup and technical nonsense they're not concerned with anyway. Sometimes it's fully inappopriate; sometimes a custom one is better than off-the-shelf. But you really can't see why anybody would want to use one? Ever?
Actually most people have been praising Drupal for its excellent security. You aren't going to find a CMS with a much better track record than Drupal.
What they were mainly saying is that Drupal is extremely popular with lots of people looking to exploit it, so it might theoretically be a high risk. A less well known CMS would not have many people looking (well, that would definitely change overnight if whitehouse.gov chose it :) and is therfore a lower risk, but also has tons of exploits not found yet.
Stick with Drupal if you want a tested, secure, and reliable CMS.
Why do you assume they're not doing that?
Because he's a moron who doesn't understand how CMSes are actually used in the real world, and thinks the only point of them is for 'dynamic' content.
When in actual fact something like half of all CMS sites are mostly 'static', with maybe a forum and an RSS feed block being their sole 'automatically changing' area, and then rest is so that people who don't know a hell of a lot about web sites can fricking manage the site, or at least their area of it, and add and remove content.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Yes, whitehouse.gov is a very attacked site, for all sorts of reasons, and I bet it will be the very first place to try out any new Drupal vulnerability, and at least one of those will succeed sometime in the next couple of years.
But, um...who cares if it does? It's not a mission critical web site. It's stupid fluff pieces about the president and his initiatives. If something goes wrong it gets flipped offline, restored from backup, patched, and brought back online.
It's interesting to see the government try OSS, and that might be an interesting discussion, but way too many people(1) here instantly leapt to the non-existence security implications, acting like important government computers were going to be exposed via any security issues in Drupal.
1) And half the remaining people appear to be morons talking about how CMS are useless. They haven't realized that stating 'people don't need CMSes' doesn't, like they think, show that they're some elite HTML coder, it just reveals them as someone who's never been hired to make a web site for someone else who then can add and remove content.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?