Open source from the White House [LWN.net]

The White House - the seat of the US presidency - has announced that it is releasing some of its improvements to the Drupal content management system. "By releasing some of our code, we get the benefit of more people reviewing and improving it. In fact, the majority of the code for WhiteHouse.gov is already open source as part of the Drupal project. The code we're releasing today adds to Drupal's functionality in three key ways." It is nice to see that the president's office cares about such things.

Open source from the White House

Posted Apr 22, 2010 7:15 UTC (Thu) by lacostej (guest, #2760) [Link] (2 responses)

I really hope for them they didn't introduce security issues in the code. Otherwise some people are going to have a very fun time with a very public web site...

That's another reason for people to start working with the community early: don't deploy live non peer reviewed changes.

Open source from the White House

Posted Apr 22, 2010 21:38 UTC (Thu) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]

Any website is a "live non peer reviewed [change]" to some degree :)

Open source from the White House

Posted Apr 22, 2010 22:40 UTC (Thu) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link]

Whitehouse.gov's Drupal installation isn't directly accessible from the public internet. It's proxied through akamai.

Open source from the White House

Posted Apr 22, 2010 10:07 UTC (Thu) by djzort (guest, #57189) [Link]

whats also good to see is government not shoveling taxpayer money in to 'market leaders' bank accounts

Open source from the White House

Posted Apr 23, 2010 0:23 UTC (Fri) by AndreE (guest, #60148) [Link] (6 responses)

Colour me slightly cynical, but the way they are wording it suggests that they *chose* to release their changes.

Doesn't being GPL mean changes to Drupal MUST be released? Or must your changes only be released if you redistribute your changes?

Open source from the White House

Posted Apr 23, 2010 0:53 UTC (Fri) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331) [Link]

You're confusing the GPL and the AGPL. The output of a GPLed program isn't covered by the GPL, so as long as the modified Drupal never leaves White House servers, the modifications don't need to be distributed. The AGPL would require a user-visible way to download the complete source of the program, however, including any modifications.

Open source from the White House

Posted Apr 23, 2010 23:25 UTC (Fri) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054) [Link] (4 responses)

Or must your changes only be released if you redistribute your changes?

Isn't this the difference between GPLv2 and GPLv3? In v2, it's as you say—distribute code, you must distribute the source. v2 doesn't cover running it behind a web site, though. Examining the Drupal 6.16 source, strongly suggests that they mean v2.

Open source from the White House

Posted Apr 24, 2010 4:10 UTC (Sat) by wblew (subscriber, #39088) [Link] (1 responses)

As clearly identified by drupal: http://drupal.org/contribute/documentation their PHP code (the stuff that runs on the whitehouse.gov servers) is indeed licensed by the GLPv2. [note: this link was retrieved on April 23, 2010].

As such, whitehouse.gov is entirely within their rights to not release any of their changes, so long as they do not distribute those changes in some binary format. Recall, you (or anybody else) using the whitehouse.gov website is NOT in any form the distribution of the PHP code that runs that site.

To their credit, they are sharing their changes with the community.

As for the AGPL, they are NOT offering a web service. Thus the AGPL license was not intended for their purpose. See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html

Tangential AGPL discussion

Posted Apr 26, 2010 17:57 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

Section 13 of the AGPL 3.0 doesn't restrict an offer of the source code to users of "Web services" according to the strictest interpretation of that term (which may not be what you implied, but many people regard "Web services" and a Web site as separate things). Instead, "all users interacting with it [the software] remotely through a computer network" are entitled to the source.

No, it's not the difference between GPLv2 and GPLv3

Posted Apr 25, 2010 21:47 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

Isn't this the difference between GPLv2 and GPLv3?

No, it's not. It's perfectly legal with both GPLv2 and GPLv3 to keep you private modifications private. At one point in GPLv3 review process it looked like GPLv3 will require redistribution of course in cases like this one. Reaction from "big boyz" was so negative (people were ready to fork the FSF projects if the need arise to avoid such fate) that this requirement was removed. Very few programs use AGPL and this is understandable because it's banned by a lot of organizations...

No, it's not the difference between GPLv2 and GPLv3

Posted Apr 27, 2010 1:09 UTC (Tue) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link]

The GPLv3 allows optional compatibility with the AGPL, but only for a combined work. (Section 13.)