techPresident – Why the White House’s Embrace of Drupal Matters

Drupal developers are abuzz with the realization that the White House’s new Recovery.gov site was built using the free and open-source content management platform Drupal. Pre-Recovery.gov, the perhaps highest-profile use of Drupal had been the Onion website. But that’s not the only reason that Drupal fans are excited. I asked two CMS expert friends to help me understand the situation, and here are a few of the reasons they gave for why the White House’s embrace of Drupal is momentous:

Open-source software is the most cost-effective and often the most user-friendly option for academic and educational users but central IT groups are usually too wedded to Windows and afraid of the unknown to look at them.

Having such a visible use of open-source software from a traditionally technology conservative source should hopefully speed up its acceptance by the mainstream.