Publisher, conference convener, and lover of animal pen drawings Tim O'Reilly gives us his insight into how the White House just switched from a proprietary content management system whipped up by a federal contractor to one based on Drupal, the free and open source software made by the Internet. Or, more specifically, by people who spend a lot of time on the Internet and like to make and give away software.

There are three things about O'Reilly's analysis that pop out in particular. Consider this fair warning: the first is really, really technical, at least for 98% of the population. O'Reilly gives word that the White House will be using an implementation of Drupal that makes use of what is called the LAMP stack in softwarese. The "L" is for Linux, the open-source operating system. (It'll be of the Red Hat variety, says Tim.) The "A" is for the Apache web server software package, itself open source. Because you're getting the hang of this and realizing we're dealing with an acronym here, we'll just say that rounding things out are MySQL for database stuff and either Perl, Python, or PHP for a programming language. (The trouble with acronyms, perhaps.) The search engine on the site -- on of the very few things that actually might look different to mere mortals post-switch -- is based on Apache Solr. That's a chunk of code that the CNET Network thunked up and then passed back to the Drupal community. That practice of share and share alike is one of the things that makes the open source software movement so special.

Which is, coincidentally, just about the perfect set up for the second thing that jumps out of O'Reilly's post. (Don't worry, this one is understandable for even layfolk.) When the White House's switch to Drupal will really get jazzy and exciting, says O'Reilly, is when...