Yesterday the White House Office of New Media announced it had migrated its legacy system for whitehouse.gov to Drupal.  Let’s be clear that this constitutes a change in plumbing – important plumbing – and not policy – but is a significant and of course highly visible sign that open source software has gone main stream.

Perhaps we can look forward to that day in the future when someone quips “No one ever got fired for implementing Drupal”.

This made yesterday a double red letter day for me and my colleagues in Oregon; an open source application was rolled out in mission-critical environment in government AND it was one the projects supported by Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab (OSL) where I work.  Double the satisfaction.  Although I don’t talk about it much here – where I focus on government adoption of open source – our core activity at the OSL is supporting many significant open source projects through hosting, administration and development as part of our charter to build community.  We’ve been quietly at work since 2003 at this important endeavor.

There is no shortage of news coverage on this event so I won’t rehash here.  I’m focused on the upcoming Government Open Source Conference – GOSCON DC, but wanted to share with you that Drupal Association will be present at the event next week – November 5 at the Ronald Regan Building & International Trade Center.  On-line registration is still open, hope you will plan to join us if you’re in the area (or make the trip, we have colleagues as far away as Japan joining us for the day!)