Whitehouse.gov Moves to Open Source Drupal . . . So What?

Publishing mogul Tim O'Reilly posted a commentary on 10/25/09 about the White House's move to open source Drupal for their content management system (CMS). It's an interesting article in which he makes the following statement near the bottom which reads:

"Features that would have cost millions of dollars and years of development to add will now be rolled into the scope of current contracts."

The it's intended context, that open source is significantly better and cheaper than commercial applications, the above comment, coming from someone like Tim O'Reilly surprises me. Why? Because it's false! Does Tim think that the Drupal community, or open source communities in general, are the only ones that shares code and applications? It's no secret that I am a huge ColdFusion supporter. Maybe there is an upfront cost to the ColdFusion stack, but anyone who has worked in the environment will tell you that the savings in development time, especially on an enterprise scope project such as the Whitehouse.com website, will quickly recover the up front cost, and from that point on, it's pure savings.

Some may argue that the savings, in the case of the President's website, is in the fact that others, not White House programmers, write the code. Well, let's see. The White House employed prime contractor General Dynamics Information Systems, Drupal specialists Phase 2 and Acquia, hosting provider Terremark, and CDN-supplier Akamai, in order to pull this off. That had to have taken an economic stimulus package all it's own. Oh, and Tim O'Reilly has stock in Acquia (a fact that to his credit, he properly disclose in his article).

Please understand. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Tim O'Reilly. I also know that I'm basically a nobody in the IT world. I have no bone other than with the general mindset that open source is the answer to all the world's IT woes - it just ain't true. And I have never seen a cost analysis that proves, in the enterprise, it is a long term cost savings. What you save in software licensing fees, you will quickly eat up in deployment and development fees. And the maintenance is often much more painful than with some commercial products. (Just ask any Java developer when Java goes from, say Java 4 to Java 5). Many commercial products (such as ColdFusion) have a nearly pain free and almost 100% backward compatible upgrade path. Can you say SAVINGS?

There is a time and place for any solutions - otherwise, they would not really be a solution at all. I wish the White House all the best with their Drupal deployment.

Tim O'Reilly's article: http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/whitehouse-switch-drupal-opensource.html