The www.whitehouse.gov website shifted over to the free open source Drupal content management system (CMS) yesterday, according to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle. A CMS is a software package that lets you build a website that non-technical people can quickly and easily (and therefore affordably) change and update.

“We now have a technology platform to get more and more voices on the site,” White House new media director Macon Phillips was quoted in the article. “This is state-of-the-art technology and the government is a participant in it.”

While the article focuses largely on the counterintuitive security benefits of free open source software (due to thousands of people around the world collaborating on picking apart and improving the code), Drupal will offer the White House other advantages.  Drupal has a huge library of user-contributed modules that the White House can use to expand its social media capabilities, including such options as super-scalable live chats and multilingual support. The Drupal community will keep expanding this library as technology changes, enabling the White House to benefit from those new features without having to pay to develop them.

The White House website’s shift is obviously a big win for free open source software packages. The White House endorsement will almost certainly inspire more government entities to follow suit, ultimately saving federal, state, and local government entities a lot of software development money.

As a side benefit, as the San Francisco Chronicle article notes, widespread government adoption of open source software packages would help President Obama keep his pledge to make government more open and transparent. After all, what could be more transparent than sharing your computer code with the world.