from Hacker News

The White House just open sourced their first Github repo

by maxogden on 8/23/12, 10:48 PM with 121 comments

• by ef4 on 8/24/12, 12:49 AM

  > "President Obama is committed to creating the most open and participatory government in our nation’s history"

  I'll believe that when his administration stops being one of the most secretive and most aggressive prosecutors of whistleblowers in recent history.

  Sources:

  http://www.salon.com/2012/02/09/obamas_unprecedented_war_on_... http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/06/obamas-whistlebl... http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/04/expert_con... http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/us/politics/new-rules-to-c... http://www.salon.com/2012/03/30/the_most_transparent_adminis... https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/24/us/government-documents-i...

• by daenz on 8/23/12, 11:32 PM

  And, in the spirit of the project, they'll reject all pull requests with a patronizing response about the way things are.[1][2]

  1. https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/legalize-and-regul...

  2. https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/abolish-tsa-and-us...

• by izakage on 8/23/12, 11:18 PM

  I am curious about GPL compatibility in this situation. According to [1], software developed by US federal government cannot be licensed under the GPL since it is automatically in the public domain. However, the github repo readme makes the following claim:

  "The project utilizes code licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License and therefore is licensed under GPL v2 or later."

  While I applaud this effort and wish to see more like it in the future, is there a possible issue with licensing here?

  [1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#GP...

• by snowwrestler on 8/24/12, 12:49 AM

  Just want to point out that this is not the first code contributed to open source from the WhiteHouse.gov project. Several of the Drupal modules developed for the site were made available to the community on Drupal.org not long after the new site launched. Some examples (may not be all of them):

  http://drupal.org/project/govdelivery http://drupal.org/project/akamai http://drupal.org/project/context_http_headers http://drupal.org/project/node_embed

  Actually it strikes me as a little strange that this code is on Github since Drupal.org has an entire section devoted to Drupal "distributions", which is what this appears to be. I mean, is the White House tech office moving to a full open source development model? Are they planning to appoint volunteer maintainers and accept pull requests? I sort of doubt it.

• by sneak on 8/24/12, 12:12 AM

  Who cares? This is boring code. Save all the "it portends an open government!" handwaving for once the Obama admin does something _actually_ meaningful (in a positive way - starting a new war doesn't count).

  Seriously. Much ado about a Drupal module that is used for people to petition the government to be patronized and ignored.

• by dkhenry on 8/23/12, 11:29 PM

  It would be really cool if they let the devs use their public names and GitHub accounts to commit. As of right now it is WH-NewMedia, and there is no history. Makes me think this is a marketing excersize rather then a new leaf in federal software development.

• by intoit on 8/23/12, 11:19 PM

  Moving from MongoDB to MySQL. I never understood why people felt they need MongoDB/NoSQL for their projects. Does anyone have an example where it was really necessary/advantageous?

• by arctangent on 8/24/12, 12:13 AM

  Here in the UK, the Government Digital Service [1] are doing much the same thing. They're building a single site for all government services and publishing all their code on GitHub.

  [1] http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/

• by throwaway54-762 on 8/23/12, 11:09 PM

  I've never seen the name "Obama" and "licensed under GPL v2 or later" in the same document before -- cool.

• by jgoney on 8/24/12, 7:56 AM

  I'm a little disappointed; I wouldn't have thought this community to be so cynical and partisan. Can't we all just get along?

• by klearvue on 8/23/12, 11:59 PM

  While this is the first with respect to releasing on Github, in April 2010 White House also released 2 open source Drupal modules (for Akamai integration and another one).

• by ejesse on 8/24/12, 12:08 AM

  Now if we could just get THOMAS into Github so we can upgrade that beast...

• by kennywinker on 8/24/12, 12:14 AM

  Finally I can sass the whitehouse using github issues!

  https://github.com/WhiteHouse/petition/issues/2

• by ceol on 8/24/12, 5:14 AM

  Ignoring all the snarky comments about how the current administration has ignored every online petition so far, this is really cool. Everyone now has a chance to have their name attached to an official government project!

• by ericdykstra on 8/24/12, 1:58 AM

  Great! Now if we can just get some transparency into issues that matter.

• by rparet on 8/24/12, 2:01 AM

  Interesting case giving up MongoDB because of the complexity of adapting another application to use it. I wonder if this is a good use case for something like http://www.nuodb.com/

• by robgolding on 8/24/12, 11:18 AM

  Check out the first commit to this project: https://github.com/WhiteHouse/petition/commit/fcb103e966f777...

• by kyebosh on 8/23/12, 11:38 PM

  Certainly an interesting microcosm of a type of democracy... I wonder how feasible this kind of model would be for actual policy making.

• by kellysutton on 8/23/12, 11:14 PM

  Suddenly, I became interested in politics again.

• by stephenhandley on 8/24/12, 8:17 AM

  $markup .= 'You've got my vote, Little Face Mitt.';

• by thinkingisfun on 8/24/12, 12:42 PM

  Here's the quote I was looking for.

  "A totalitarian state simply enunciates official doctrine -- clearly, explicitly. Internally, one can think what one likes, but one can only express opposition at one's peril. In a democratic system of propaganda no one is punished (in theory) for objecting to official dogma. In fact, dissidence is encouraged. What this system attempts to do is to fix the limits of possible thought: supporters of official doctrine at one end, and the critics -- vigorous, courageous, and much admired for their independence of judgment -- at the other. The hawks and the doves. But we discover that all share certain tacit assumptions, and that it is these assumptions that are really crucial. No doubt a propaganda system is more effective when its doctrines are insinuated rather than asserted, when it sets the bounds for possible thought rather than simply imposing a clear and easily identifiable doctrine that one must parrot -- or suffer the consequences. The more vigorous the debate, the more effectively the basic doctrines of the propaganda system, tacitly assumed on all sides, are instilled. Hence the elaborate pretense that the press is a critical dissenting force -- maybe even too critical for the health of democracy -- when in fact it is almost entirely subservient to the basic principles of the ideological system: in this case, the principle of the right of intervention, the unique right of the United States to serve as global judge and executioner. It is quite a marvelous system of indoctrination."

  -- Noam Chomsky, "Language and Responsibility" (1977)

  But of course, that was then, today it's totally different, right? Right.

• by justinph on 8/24/12, 1:39 AM

  Neat. Too bad it's drupal, rendering it totally useless to people with actual taste or skill.