A year ago, I wrote about how those looking for work should consider learning Drupal, an open-source Web content management system. According to the project team, Drupal now powers 1 percent of all of the Web sites in the world.
Throughout 2010, I made a habit of wrapping up interviews with what I am sure was perceived as a cruelly broad question: “What do you think the future Internet will look like?”
The responses I received varied a great deal, but usually began with something along the lines of “Wow. That’s a big question.”
Admit it... you still have the mental energy for just one more list of prediction about 2011, right? Well, we have saved the best for last.
Announcing our inaugural list of (drum roll please...) 10 Companies to Watch in 2011!
This is not an exhaustive list as there are a number of exciting companies in the Boston area, but here are ten companies that definitely have our attention.
We know you have an opinion or your own picks, so comments are welcome below!
Open..and Shut Even as we rapidly approach a future where most software lives on the web, with acronyms like HTML5 and SaaS pointing the way, it's easy to overlook a primary building blog of yesterday's web, Drupal, and its effects on the future web. Drupal founder Dries Buytaert claims that Drupal already powers one per cent of the web. Could it do more?
Now 10,000 sites strong, Acquia’s hosted version of Drupal, Drupal Gardens, which debuted in January – is positioned not only to eliminate barriers to adoption of the open source content management system to a crowd that would rather be hands-off on the hosting, configuration, security and upgrade front. It also is positioned potentially to help push the Semantic Web ahead, bringing technologies such as RDF to the attention of a new swath of users if it successfully surfs the wave behind Drupal.
Drupal Gardens, the planned cloud version of the open source Drupal content management system, went into a public beta stage Thursday, thus making it widely available for tryouts , said Drupal founder Dries Buytaert.
Drupal software, support, and hosting company Acquia announced that its Drupal Gardens leaves private beta today. Drupal Gardens is a content management & social publishing system, offering "Drupal-as-a-service" and greatly simplifying the creation and management of Drupal websites.
Whether you want to call it open core or open source or something else entirely, the software as a service business model has been gaining popularity.
Among the companies that have achieved financial success while having open source software at its core is Acquia, co-founded by the original developer of the Drupal Project, Dries Buytaert. I had the opportunity today to chat via phone with Buytaert and Acquia's CEO, Tom Erickson, about Drupal, Acquia's business model and the future of open source.
Every few years, Drupal violates one of the industry's most sacred rules: don't break your APIs.
The next version of the popular open source content management system – Drupal 7 – will do just that. And more. It will offer a redesigned user interface that targets – gasp! – non-technical users. It will hide features that devs know and love.
Acquia released a new social software suite this week they are calling Drupal Commons. It's an open-source alternative to the proprietary Enterprise 2.0 suites we've written about quite often here. Acquia's Jay Batson was full of optimism about it when he wrote: "Time--once again--for open source to go blow the doors off another proprietary software cathedral." In this case, the cathedral is social software suites.
In the open source software community, there's considerable nervousness about paying people to work on volunteer-driven projects. For example, Joomla recently hired some developers to work on its core software, a decision that has caused much debate in the Joomla community.
Acquia, a commercial open source software company that provides products, services and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system, has selected Gluster's open source storage solutions.
With the impressive rise of Drupal over the past several years, a number of consulting and integration firms have emerged with specific expertise in Drupal. The best known of these is Acquia, the “commercial arm” of Drupal, providing products, services, and technical support. Recently Acquia began distributing a community platform called “Commons”. We caught up with co-founder Jay Batson to ask about Commons, and its role in the online community sector.
The tension between configuration and programming is an enduring problem that is familiar to anyone who has had to attempt to run their business using a software application. Drupal Gardens is combining principles of open source to the Software as a Service model to find a way to get the best of both worlds.
The Drupal content management system (CMS) is one of the most successful open source projects on the Internet today, thanks in no small part to its community.
Drupal 7, the next major version of the popular open source content management system, could reach a release candidate stage as early as this week, the founder of the system said on Wednesday.
