In the United States, the White House has led the march towards open source and free software by switching the http://www.whitehouse.gov/ website to the Drupal content management system. The government of the United Kingdom has decided to follow their lead.

During a keynote speech at this year's DrupalCon in San Francisco, David Cole, a Senior Advisor to the CIO of the Executive Office of the President, announced that the US Presidential web site developers are contributing some of their custom code to the Drupal project

For open source and Linux, 2009 has been another year of big and surprising milestones, from the White House adopting open source technology to Microsoft submitting code for the Linux kernel."

Dave Cole, a senior advisor to the CIO of the Executive Office of the President, announced the code release this afternoon during a keynote at the DrupalCon trade show in downtown San Francisco.

Under the open-source model, thousands of people pick it apart simultaneously and increase security. It comes more cheaply than computer coding designed for a single client, such as the Executive Office of the President.

IT organizations that feel safe from open source licensing violations might be wise to check their code, as open source components are rapidly seeping into applications by way of offshore and in-house developers taking open source shortcuts, as well as a growing population of open source-savvy grads entering the workforce.

I’m excited today to announce that we are also releasing the ASP.NET MVC source code under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL). MS-PL is an OSI-approved open source license. The MS-PL contains no platform restrictions and provides broad rights to modify and redistribute the source code. You can read the text of the MS-PL at: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ms-pl.html

Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery will help put jQuery, AJAX, and JavaScript effects into your Drupal 6 modules and themes.One will be able to learn about JavaScript support in Drupal 6.

Last week Wednesday the Diaspora team released the source code for their social networking system to the world. The distributed, open source, so-called Facebook competitor released its code to the public recently but there seems to be some misunderstandings about what the release is all about