Open Source Software Made Developers Cool. Now It Can Make Them Rich
,----[ Quote ]
| In 2007, some 30 open source software companies were purchased for more than
| $1 billion — double the number of sales in 2005, according to consulting firm
| 451 Group. And 2008 is proving to be even more frenetic. In January alone,
| Sun Microsystems announced the purchase of open source pioneer MySQL for $1
| billion; open source development players Covalent and SpringSource merged;
| and Nokia agreed to pay $153 million for the open source mobile-software
| maker Trolltech.
`----
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-04/bz_opensource
OSBC: Acquia to launch this fall “Carbon” social web publishing system based on
Drupal
,----[ Quote ]
| Acquia was founded in 2007 and received $7 million in Series A funding from
| North Bridge Venture Partners and others.
| Acquia’s founders are Dries Buytaert, the creator and project lead of the
| Drupal open source web content management system, and Jay Batson, previously
| founder and CEO of Pingtel.
`----
http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=2161
Related:
How The GPL Can Save Your Ass
,----[ Quote ]
| If you are the multi-billion dollar IT industry you stick you head in the
| sand and just keep making cars. It is after all, not your problem. That seems
| to be the attitude of almost every company with a vested interest in the
| computing market. There was a recent announcement indicating Intel and
| Microsoft have put up $10 million to fund research in parallel software. Hah!
| I'm going to laugh harder this time HAH, HAH! Ever here the phase pissing in
| the ocean, well this is more like throwing a match into the sun. We need
| more -- much more.
|
| [...]
|
| Second, the entire in industry must co-operate and be involved. We need
| everyone working on this problem. The best minds in high performance
| computing have been at it for quite a while and it is time to turn up the
| volume. Fantasies of telling your R&D guys to get on it are not enough.
| Trying to corral your Intellectual Property (IP) with trade secrets and
| patents is wishful thinking. The rocket scientists (and plenty of other smart
| people) have been working on this issue for a long time. You don't have the
| time to waste trying to expand your IP fiefdom. Instead start thinking about
| what happens when the next generation of products is of absolutely no
| interest to your customers.
|
| Third we need to respond quickly. There is no time for IP agreements,
| posturing, and NIH ego trips (Not Invented Here). We need leaders to
| recognize the scope and magnitude of this challenge and act. Before too long,
| it will not be unreasonable to have four or even eight cores in a desktop. A
| workstation or server may have double this amount. It would sure be nice if
| my software could effectively use all these cores.
|
| [...]
|
| Using the GPL will immediately remove issues that would normally choke such
| an important undertaking. First, the any IP barriers get pushed aside and
| everyone can cooperate openly
`----
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/5379
Open Source Drupal Goes Commercial With Acquia
,----[ Quote ]
| 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.
`----
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3731476
Drupal goes commercial
,----[ Quote ]
| Drupal is currently distributed under a GPL2 licence and Buytaert says that
| the commercial version will also be distributed under a GPL2 licence.
`----
http://www.tectonic.co.za/?p=2199
A Big Drop in the Bucket for Drupal
,----[ Quote ]
| Apparently, the days when a computer science graduate student can invent some
| cool Web software and raise a few million dollars to build a company around
| it are not over. Brand new (less than a month old) North Andover, MA, startup
| Acquia announced yesterday that it’s raised $7 million to market software and
| services in support of the popular Web publishing system Drupal, invented by
| Dries Buytaert, a PhD candidate at the University of Ghent in Belgium.
|
| Like the Linux operating system, the Apache web server, and the MySQL
| database system, Drupal is a free, open-source program with a large community
| of volunteer developers and users. And Acquia’s CEO, Jay Batson, says it will
| remain so. Rather than creating and selling a proprietary version of Drupal—
| or “forking” the system, in geek speak—Acquia will work on specialized
| distributions of the software and help organizations deploy it on a larger
| scale. “We will be to Drupal what Red Hat is to Linux,” Batson says.
`----
http://www.xconomy.com/2007/12/20/a-big-drop-in-the-bucket-for-drupal/
Drupal developer bags $7 million
,----[ Quote ]
| Announcing US$7 million in first round founding from North Bridge Venture
| Partners, Sigma Partners, and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Buytaert and Jay
| Batson, former CEO and founder of Pingtel, hope to steer their Drupal spun
| startup Acquia deeper into the enterprise.
`----
http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php?id=1547664640&rid=-50
Open-source tools open democracy's doors
,----[ Quote ]
| According to a Vancouver Web guru, "You can't build a free and open society
| using proprietary software."
|
| [...]
|
| Nelson said Drupal started when a Belgian named Dries Buytaert was looking at
| developing an on-line bulletin-board-style system for the co-op he was living
| in, one that would enable people to exchange messages. Buytaert, then a
| university student, still maintains a Web site at buytaert.net/ and,
| according to Nelson, released the Drupal codebase under a GNU licence,
| meaning it conforms to open source.
`----
http://www.straight.com/article-117320/open-source-tools-open-democracys-doors
Drupal founder Dries Buytaert balances community and company interests
,----[ Quote ]
| In the year 2000, Dries Buytaert created Drupal, a freely licensed and open
| source tool to manage websites, as a bulletin board for his college dorm.
| Since Dries released the software and a community of thousands of volunteer
| developers have added and improved modules, Drupal has grown immensely
| popular. Drupal won the overall Open CMS Award in 2007, and some speakers in
| Drupal's spacious developer's room at FOSDEM 2008 were dreaming aloud of its
| world domination.
|
| Buytaert (now 29) just finished his doctoral thesis and has founded the
| start-up Acquia. The new company wants to become Drupal's best friend, with
| the help of an all-star team and US$7 million collected from venture
| capitalists. Wikinews reporter Michaël Laurent sat down with Dries in
| Brussels to discuss these recent exciting developments.
`----
http://www.huliq.com/51507/drupal-founder-dries-buytaert-balances-community-and-company-interests
Drupal 6.0 released
,----[ Quote ]
| After one year of development we are ready to release Drupal 6.0 to the
| world. Thanks to the tireless work of the Drupal community, over 1,600 issues
| have been resolved during the Drupal 6.0 release cycle. These changes are
| evident in Drupal 6's major usability improvements, security and
| maintainability advancements, friendlier installer, and expanded development
| framework. Further, from bug fix to feature request, these issues
| follow-through on the Drupal project's continued commitment to deliver
| flexibility and power to themers and developers.
`----
http://drupal.org/drupal-6.0
WordPress is Open Source
,----[ Quote ]
| Six Apart has recently decided that the best way to win back customers
| fleeing their platforms is to target WordPress, which is a new strategy they
| call competing. (What have they been doing the past 7 years?) A good example
| is this exchange between a commenter on Valleywag and Byrne Reese, the lead
| developer of Movable Type:
|
| Sundown: “@anildash: what part of Wordpress is not open source?”
|
| byrnereese: “@Sunnduwn - I think that is a question better asked of
| Automattic. Anil, and certainly not Six Apart, has never been briefed, nor
| has anyone for that matter been presented with an accounting of what is open
| and closed source at Automattic.”
|
| Okay, here’s some accounting:
|
| WordPress is 100% open source, GPL.
|
| All plugins in the official directory are GPL or compatible, 100% open
| source.
|
| bbPress is 100% GPL.
|
| WordPress MU is 100% open source, GPL, and if you wanted you could take it
| and build your own hosted platform like WordPress.com, like edublogs.org has
| with over 100,000 blogs.
|
| There is more GPL stuff on the way, as well. :)
|
| Could you build Typepad or Vox with Movable Type? Probably not, especially
| since people with more than a few blogs or posts say it grinds to a halt, as
| Metblogs found before they switched to WordPress.
`----
http://ma.tt/2008/03/wordpress-is-open-source/
|
|
