Drupal to offer commercially available support being converted to commercial software
I just wrote about Drupal as a content management system that I recommend. Well, I read on InternetNews this morning that a company called Acquia (acquire ya?) is going to be taking the GPL licensed software to enterprise status, giving it full commercially available support.
Reportedly, they are going to stay as open as possible. “The goal is to do as much as we can with the existing Drupal community and collaborate with them… We don’t want to create a public fork.” said Dries Buytaert, the founder of the Drupal project.
If they start getting closed off from the current Drupal community, you can bet you’ll see some backlash similar to the Mambo/Joomla backlash back in August of ‘05.
Update: Apparently I have been misinformed and the only change coming from this news is that Acquia will be offering commercially available support for members of the Drupal Community who want to buy in. There is no taking over, or shutting the open source community out.
2 Comments so far ...
This doesn’t seem to be an issue. If you read the release they are going to create a distribution that anyone can download. The additional modules anyone can download. All of the software will be GPL.
What they say they will charge for is services.
Was there backlash in the linux community when red hat came out with a distribution? An open and free for all distribution? I’m not talking about their commercial distribution.
News suggesting a possible problem, like this one, is the only place suggestions like this are coming from. Core developers are glad this is happening. The biggest contributors are happy with this.
Did Wordpress go bad when automattic started offering services? No.
Basically, stop trying to stir the pot. It’s not cool. You are misrepresenting what’s going on in the drupal community. Don’t lead others to discontentment that doesn’t really exist.
Comment on March 4, 2008 11:26 amTalk about a misleading, irresponsible headline. What ever happened to giving folks the benefit of the doubt?
To claim that drupal is being “converted” to commercial software is, quite frankly, ridiculous.
Would you say the same about RedHat? MySQL? Ubuntu? Zend?
The fact is Acquia is a brand new company who hasn’t had time to develop a relationship with the community. Knowing the folks involved however, I have little doubt that they will be great partners. To assume otherwise is a bit too cynical for me.
Comment on March 5, 2008 05:44 am