If you haven’t heard, the whitehouse.gov team has announced that their entire platform is running on drupal and a few other open source projects powering their servers.

This is big news for the open source movement but more than that it really goes to show that there is no need to reinvent the wheel, specially at this scale.

Here’s a link to an interesting article (by Tim O’Reilly) in which he makes some good points about the value of tapping into on going open source initiatives and how that enables the government (in this case) to cut costs, get access to countless modules and plugins to achieve functionality they otherwise would have had to develop on their own, have an incredible community of people working on the software making it secure, fast and pretty much the best in can be.. etc, etc.

It’s a good read if you have a few minutes to spare.

Wordpress and drupal are very similar in that they both have gained massive attention both from developers creating things for it and organizations adopting them.. they also do very similar things.