Open source software continues its torrid pace. In fact, according to a report from the 451 Group, the sector saw its biggest quarter for venture funding -- hitting $203.75 million, which is up from $100.4 million in the same period a year ago.
Why the interest? Well, I had a chance to interview Matthew Aslett, who is an analyst of enterprise software at the 451 Group.
*Your take on the focus on open source?*
VCs are interested in open source vendors because the open source development and distribution models reduce start-up costs and lower the barriers to entry.
Early in March I posted about hearing the founder of Drupal, Dries Buytaert, speak in Boston as part of an adjunct to the AiiM Show called DrupalCon. Part of that Drupal event was the first public explanation of the strategy behind Dries’ new venture called Acquia. Acquia is a commercial company to service and support Drupal as the popular open source social publishing platform tries to move to the next level in the market.
Six hot open source startups and projects got notice at the Open Source Business Conference this week.
Not surprisingly, many of them are in software categories deemed most vulnerable to open source disruption, including collaboration and conferencing, social publishing, sales automation, application deployment and developer tools.
In the last year, a growing number of companies based on free and open source software (FOSS) have come out of stealth mode. One of the latest is Acquia, which provides services for organizations that use Drupal, the popular content management platform.
You and I have a dirty little secret. Many of the Web applications that we call content management systems (Web CMS) are not really content management systems. Huh? A lot of this confusion stems from the difficulty most of us have in answering what should be a simple question, what is a content management system? Scott Abel, The Content Wranger, has noted in previous comments that one of the problems in discussions about content management is that we really lack a common definition of CMS.
There is now a VC-backed commercial company, underwritten initially to the tune of $7 million, to run interference for the LAMP-based Drupal open source project, which Ulitzer has chosen as its CMS platform among others, and take on the literally hundreds of other content management systems – open source and proprietary – that currently litter the landscape to make sure that Drupal is crowned homecoming queen, perhaps the next billion-dollar MySQL.
While Drupal has garnered surprising little press it’s got to be one of the more successful open source projects out there, but then its nearest open source rival Joomla looks to be as popular. Evidently CMS is the place to be these days.
An increasingly popular open-source Web content management program, called Drupal, will soon be available in a commercial enterprise edition. A start-up company, Acquia, announced that it would deliver a supported version of the program by the end of the year.
The company made its announcement last week at Drupalcon, a user conference held in Boston.
At DrupalCon Boston, Acquia sponsored a launch party at the Felt club in Boston. Jeff Robbins from Lullabot performed live with its former rock band Orbit, and Acquia's Jay Batson took the crowd deep into the night with progressive house and trance music. Great parteeh!
The open source CMS platform Drupal is going commercial thanks to an 11-person startup named Acquia. It recently secured $7 million in funding and plans to sell a suite of services it says will make Drupal enterprise-ready.
