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. The company will ship “Carbon,” the Drupal 6 core release and a set of “essential” extensions wrapped up with documentation and a set of support services. The code will be licensed under the GPL v2 license and Acquia will earn its revenues on maintenance and support subscriptions that let businesses “harness the full open source power of Drupal without sacrificing the accountability and support of commercial software.”
The first subscription offering is “Spokes,” an update notification service that provides “specific, actionable information” about Drupal updates that are fully-tested and supported by Acquia.
Both Carbon and Spokes are due out within the next 6 months.
By Whatcott’s count, more than 900 developers have code in the version six release of Drupal. More than 1800 modules have been created for the community. But “there’s never been a company behind” Drupal to make the open source software palatable to large businesses. “It’s 98% of the way there. Acquia takes it the rest of the way,” Whatcott says.
The question is whether a commercial effort around Drupal will be palatable to the developer community that has so embraced the software. Read the rest of this entry »
