Tim O'Reilly just posted his "Thoughts on the Whitehouse.gov switch to Drupal".

2 interesting points made:

1) It's really hard to do business in DC. Change comes to DC at a glacial pace do to the arcane and difficult FedBizOpps procedures. I wonder if .gov would be better served if they had an open source development shop within the govt rather than relying on FedBizOpps. GPO? GSA?

First off, government has a huge number of special requirements (remember the flap over President Obama's blackberry?) Second, don't underestimate the difficulty of doing business in Washington. Procurement is done through a complex ballet understood by few open source companies. Third, a big IT deployment like this requires coordination between many companies, each providing a piece of the puzzle. According to techpresident.com, no fewer than five firms were involved in the switch: prime contractor General Dynamics Information Systems, Drupal specialists Phase 2 and Acquia, hosting provider Terremark, and CDN-supplier Akamai. (Disclosure: O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures is an investor in Acquia.)

2) using open source and contributing to open source are 2 different things (I've been trying to make my library understand that difference and move toward the contribution side of the equation!).

It's also important to realize that using open source is very different from contributing to open source. Despite the exaggerated claims in the AP story, that "the programming language is written in public view, available for public use and able for people to edit", the White House has not yet released any of the modifications they made to Drupal or its operating environment back to the open source community. The source code for Drupal (and the rest of the LAMP stack) is indeed available, but the modifications that were made to meet government security, scalability, and hosting requirements have not yet been shared. In my conversations with the new media team at the White House, it is clear that they are exploring this option.

CENDI, the federal STI mangers cooperative, has just released a FAQ document focusing on the legal and business aspects of OSS for government. See www.cendi.gov

Also see recently released DOD policy and FAQs at http://www.defenselink.mil/cio-nii/sites/oss/index.shtml