I am not sure how much of this is going to be exciting for consumers out there, but this is pretty awesome for web developers. The White House official website (www.whitehouse.gov) is built on an open source platform called Drupal.
Drupal, amoung other open source (another words, “free” code base platforms) such as WordPress and Joomla, is often used for a large-content websites to offer an administrator of that website a user-friendly way to edit/update/create content without any web programing knowledge.
These Content Management Systems (CMS) have years and years of development, along with thousands of developers world wide adding to them to make them better. Like with anything in life there are pros and cons about using an open source CMS, but this is not the time to open up that can of warms.
Anyway, representatives of White House official website made an announcement to release modules of Drupal code they have developed and customized as open source, i.e. are giving them away free.
Imagine your best website developer, the most expansive budget then multiply it times 10 (at least). This is how much time and money the White House has invested into their website, after all the do have to represent the nation on the internet. Now they are making all those custom changes available to other, this is amazing!