If you have gone to whitehouse.gov since Saturday you may not have noticed any real changes. On the outside this is true, but underneath the hood they just replaced the entire engine and drive train.

When President Obama took over at 1600 Pennsylvania one of the first things he did was order the people who manage the White House website to investigate new software. The outcome was a move from expensive and clunky proprietary software to a very familiar open source system – Drupal.

Now I don’t expect all our readers to know what Drupal is, but actually it should be very familiar. Drupal is the same software that powers Crooks and Liars. The software is extremely robust and can be extended beyond you imagination through contributed modules. In the coming months you will see more examples of this as we start rolling out our latest updated that includes countless new features to better engage you – the C&L community.

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Open source software is everywhere. It runs not only this blog, but also our servers – as well as a mass majority of the blogosphere and web. The software doesn’t cost anything to use, or even alter, but it has been the foundation of an industry estimated to be valued at $60 billion. Imagine something that is essentially free generating tons of revenue. That idea would make George Bush’s head explode.

Now we are in a new era with a new President and it looks like he is open to taking our governments mindset out of the 90s and bring them into the new millennium when it comes to software choices:

The secret to a more secure and cost effective government is through open source technologies and products.

The claim comes from one of Silicon Valley's most respected business leaders Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

He revealed he has been asked to prepare a paper on the subject for the new administration.

"It's intuitively obvious open source is more cost effective and productive than proprietary software," he said.

"Open source does not require you to pay a penny to Microsoft or IBM or Oracle or any proprietary vendor any money."

You can hear lobbyists from companies like Microsoft flocking on D.C. already to try and stop this. Hopefully they fail, because open source software is the way to go. Supporting a growing industry like this is something synonymous with economic stimulus. Small start up companies that specialize in different open source applications could see themselves grow by receiving support and development requests from the U.S. government.