The popular open source content management system Drupal is going commercial, reports InternetNews. A new company called Acquia, which is led by Drupal founder Dries Buytaert, plans to offer a commercial version of the content management system based on the free version but with a host of additional modules.
Drupal may well be the unsung success story of the open source movement. The content management platform has been downloaded over 2 million times, as often as mySQL and more than Redhat. So says Jeff Whatcott, the voice of Acquia, the company created to put a commercial wrapper around Drupal in order to extend the content management system’s reach into enterprise accounts.
At Drupalcon this morning, Acquia laid out its plans for a commercially-supported Drupal.
Acquia Inc. has launched a suite of products based on the Drupal open-source social publishing system, officials said.
Acquia, founded in June 2007, employs 12 workers. The company develops products based on Drupal, an open-source platform for Internet applications such as blogs, wikis, community networks, digital-media portals, and core web content management. The technology is most popular with media and publishing companies, said Jeff Whatcott, vice president of marketing for Acquia.
Last December, I mentioned my excitement about Drupal's project lead, Dries Buytaert, along with Jay Batson starting a company called Acquia. While it was known that the $7 million startup would focus on Drupal for the enterprise, what was not known was the products and services that would be offered by the company. In a press release today, Acquia finally unveiled its roadmap to commercially support Drupal.
Acquia, a North Andover, Mass.-based startup, is announcing a supported product using Drupal, the open-source programming language that underlies many of the community aspects on the web, from sites such as Fast Company to The Onion. It’s a rite of passage for an open-source project to get its very own shepherd that provides a measure of support beyond the forums and masses of independent programmers who churn out the code. For Drupal, the move is akin to Red Hat offering support for Linux and Sun taking MySQL under its wing for $1 billion.
The open source Drupal content management system is going commercial thanks to a new company, called Acquia, that's led by Dries Buytaert, the founder of the Drupal project. The new effort is aiming to bring a commercially supported version of Drupal to business users and could well end up shaking up the entire content management marketplace.
What do you do with 2,000,000 downloads and a 100% growth rate? With 240,000 members of your community and 900-plus developers (a number that doubled in 2007)?
You'd start Acquia, that's what you'd do. Or, at least, that's what North Bridge Venture Partners did, and the company looks to have a huge opportunity before it. I spent some time with Jeff Whatcott, vice president of Marketing at Acquia, to get more detail on the company and its launch of its products.
When we were searching around for a new content system to power the next version of our main website, we were amazed at the selection of open source offerings that has brought the kinds of slick capabilities traditionally associated with the Interwovens and Vignettes of the world down to bite-sized packages that SMBs like us could get our arms around
A startup company will release the first commercially supported distribution of Drupal, an increasingly popular open-source Web site builder/content management system, in the second half of this year.
Acquia, cofounded by Dries Buytaert, Drupal creator and project leader, will initially release a distribution code-named "Carbon," consisting of the Drupal 6.x core, the top 30 Drupal modules among the roughly 1,800 now in existence; a packaged installer; and assorted documentation and site-building guidelines.