This site exists for the public good. Following that philosophy, we try to use open source tools wherever possible. What does "open source" mean? Open source languages and programs allow you to look at their inner workings, or "source code". Most open source projects also allow you to use the code, change it, and (hopefully) improve upon it. This means that in the long run, many people can contribute, creating good tools that are cheap or free. For more information on open source, look in these places:

Home page of the open source initiative - www.opensource.org
Sourceforge - An open source development community

Operating System

FreeBSD - We still have much to learn about FreeBSD, but so far it has been a joy to use. FreeBSD is more stable and secure than most other operating systems, and it makes an ideal web server.

Languages

HTML, XHTML, and CSS - Working on getting the site to be XHTML compliant

PHP 4.6 - The web's most popular scripting language. We've been using it for years, and it does everything we need it to do. See www.php.net

punBB - We used to have some very fancy software, but it had too many features and was too hard to connect to the rest of the site. punBB is a free, open source bulliten board system, written in PHP, and it has been a breeze to use. We run it using a PostgreSQL database (see below).

PostgreSQL - This is the main database engine we use. Over four years, it has handled lots of traffic and pretty big tables with no problem.
www.postgresql.org.

MySQL We use this to power some small projects, and web statistics. go to www.mysql.com.

phpPgAdmin - A web-based tool for administering PostgreSQL databases.

Webmin - A browser-based tool for administering FreeBSD servers, this has made our transition to a new operating system MUCH easier. Thanks guys! http://www.webmin.com/