[p2p-research] Slashdot | White House Website Switches To Open Source

[Paul D. Fernhout]

http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/10/25/1126210/White-House-Website-Switches-To-Open-Source
"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.'"
http://www.whitehouse.gov/
http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/whitehousegov-goes-drupal
http://buytaert.net/whitehouse-gov-using-drupal


 From the techpresident link: "Let's really try to extract the last drop of 
possible meaning from a choice over a CMS. Squint a bit, and it's possible 
to see the White House's move to open-source software as a move towards the 
idea that collaborative programming can inspire -- or at least, support -- a 
more distributed politics. That idea bubbled up in 2004, when young 
programmers experimented with using Drupal itself to turn the Howard Dean 
campaign into the Howard Dean network. This idea, that a politics crafted by 
the people could be a powerful thing indeed, emerged in a slightly mutated 
way during the Obama presidential campaign, but has arguably receded below 
the surface during the first nine months of the Obama Administration. First 
the WhiteHouse.gov CMS gets more open, then the White House OS? Perhaps."

Yet, even as the White House becomes more efficient and the website costs 
less, this is one more step towards a post-scarcity future that the White 
House is not directly engaging:
"Why limited demand means joblessness"
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/10/03/why-limited-demand-means-joblessness/ 

"Summary: Mainstream economics assumes demand for almost anything is 
infinite. Thus, the theory goes, when human workers get replaced by robots, 
or better design means less human labor is needed, then there will soon be 
new jobs making new things; the only issue might be retraining. But, if 
demand is limited (because the best things in life are free or cheap, and 
everything you own also owns you), then when people get laid off, the jobs 
are gone for good, because there is nothing more that anybody wants then is 
already produced. And people having more time outside of compulsory work 
would be a good thing, if we more evenly shared the wealth from automation 
and better design, but we don’t — yet."

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/