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WhiteHouse.gov Releases Open Source Code
schliz writes "The White House has released four custom modules for the Drupal content management system. The modules address scalability, communication, and accessibility for disabled users, and the release is expected to benefit both the Drupal community and the WhiteHouse.gov site as the code is reviewed and improved by the open source community." Reader ChiefMonkeyGrinder adds an opinion piece with a somewhat envious view from the UK: "Open source is treated as something akin to devil-worshipping in some parts of government. So, the idea that a major project in the government backyard would be based on something as basic as Drupal is pretty far-fetched. No, this side of the Atlantic would have involved a closed-tender process; a decision made [behind] closed doors based on proprietary software and we'd be completely in the dark about costs, about delays, and about functionality."
I have a lot of complaints about this current administration, but I'll give them credit where it is due. This is a good move, and I hope to see similar actions in the future.
Palm trees and 8
Let's do that then :
Trustbird is a project led by the French Gendarmerie (a kind of police) in order to add military cryptography and chain-of-command features into thunderbird. It has been released publicly.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
since sliced bread. Easy and damned rapid to deploy, reasonably scalable, easy to modify and customize, flexible enough to build everything from a blog to an e-commerce system to a social networking platform to a cloud-based RDBMS front-end to a personal document and photos filing system.
A million things I used to do with my own C code, shell scripts, and hard drives are now done on a hosted domain using Drupal. More and more of the work I do for others just slides into Drupal by default because it's the easiest, most powerful, fastest, and most growth-capable way to accomplish it.
I just love Drupal.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The GPL requires copyright ownership, but work done by the Federal Government can not be copyrighted. I looked at a couple of the modules and they all include GPL v2 license. Shouldn't they be public domain?
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
And that's ignoring the fact that Marxism childishly assumes all economic transactions are zero-sum and wealth can never be created.
Where did you dig up that nonsense? Yes, communism consistently fails because it never manages to come up with a viable alternative to the market for setting prices and distributing commodities. However, there is nothing in Marxism implying that transactions are zero-sum. Marx himself, in his sections on economics, is practically orthodox Adam Smith. He is completely in agreement with Smith's stuff about gains from specialization of labor(the famous Pin Factory) and was, if anything, even more fixated on the productivity advantages of capital goods, and the way in which capital goods could be combined with labor to produce a surplus with which to produce more capital goods. The only real difference was that he took the (wholly orthodox) notion that "In a competitive market, the price of a commodity is equal to its marginal cost of production" combined that with the (also wholly orthodox) idea of "labor as commodity", and drew the unpleasant conclusion that "in a competitive market, the price of labor will be equal to the cost of bare subsistence for the laborer."(and, given what the pre-welfare-state industrial slums looked like, this wasn't exactly without empirical validation)... The whole marxist idea of labor being oppressed by capital rested on this conclusion, and on the idea(explicitly opposed to the "zero-sum" notion) that capital + labor would generate surplus value; but that, since the market for unskilled industrial labor was extremely competitive, capital would end up holding basically all the surplus value, reinvesting it in capital goods, and obtaining even more surplus value in the next round, while labor would always be stuck at a subsistence level.
Later Marxists were fascinated with(and frequently sought to emulate) to work of industrialist innovators like Ford and Taylor, precisely because they recognized that those guys where on the cutting edge of non-zero-sum transactions and maximal productivity gains from the combination of capital and labor with scientific management techniques.
Obviously, none of this denies the existence of random pot-smoking dorm-room "communists" who wear Che shirts and think that "work is slavery, man!"; but the intellectual underpinnings of Marxism and communism(as well as the activities of communist states, which tended to explicitly emphasize the swiftest possible transition from near-zero-sum subsistence activities to high-surplus industrial ones) is actually in nearly complete agreement with orthodox capitalist theorists about the non-zero-sumness of transactions, and the gains from trade and specialization of labor. Communists just don't like how those gains are distributed. Unfortunately for them, they never hit on a more viable mechanism.
It's always amusing to see ignorant Americans ridicule the French, even though the French have known warfare for thousands of years longer than America has even existed.
When the French have seen war, it has been on their own soil most of the time. They have seen entire generations fight to the death for their freedom, and that's only within the past hundred years. Meanwhile, America has barely even been scratched on its home soil. Pearl Harbor wasn't even on mainland America, but thousands of miles away. And during some battles of WWI, the French would lose a number of soldiers and civilians every 10 minutes of fighting equivalent to that of the American losses on 9/11.
The French have shown more valor, bravery and courage under fire than America ever has. The French are true warriors, and true defenders of freedom.
Of course, one of the links there is "words, not deeds" so perhaps all the noise about open source is just that.
Indeed if you read the article you would have seen a comment by a VP at Ingres that sounds remarkably similar to the criticism from the UK commentator cited at the top of the story:
Of course, Ingres has a vested interest as a competitor to Oracle, but I'm not surprised to hear that the Ministry of Defence conducts its IT negotiations behind closed doors, "in the interests of security," I'm sure.
How about http://data.gov.uk/ ? That's Drupal too.
Or is the site not really part of the Gov't?
Eric
Eric Aitala
www.f1m.com