At the beginning of November, Acquia announced that it had secured $8.5 million in funding. On this occasion, Mashable published an interview with Dries Buytaert, inventor of Drupal and co-founder of Acquia. The company, founded in 2007, sells software and products developed from Drupal, the open-source CMS created in 2000.
At the beginning of November, Acquia announced it had secured $8.5 million in funding. On this occasion, Mashable published an interview with Dries Buytaert, inventor of Drupal and co-founder of Acquia. The company, founded in 2007, sells software and products developed from Drupal, the open source CMS created in 2000.
In just a few years, Drupal has gone from a simple test by Buytaert on new technologies to a project that includes thousands of programmers worldwide. The White House, Harvard, and MTV all use Drupal to manage their sites. Acquia, like Bluedrop and many other companies, relies on Drupal, its success, and its performance for their business model.
During his interview with Mashable, Dries Buytaert spoke about the value of open source projects and the role commercial interests play in their success.
1. In your opinion, what makes an open source project successful?
In Drupal’s case, it’s really the community of people who contribute to the project. The community is very large, encompassing thousands of developers, and each of these developers participates in designing the modules. To give you an idea, there are currently 7,000 modules on the site. It’s the fact that all these people contribute to these modules that allows us to achieve both the scale and the scope of the project.
2. How did you build a strong community?
I’ve been working on Drupal for 10 years. There’s no magic formula. It definitely takes a lot of time to build a community. I spent 10 years working on Drupal to bring the CMS to where it is today. For us, a large part of community building happens offline. For example, we organize meetups, as well as Drupal conferences.
3. When you started Drupal, why did you decide to make it an open source project?
To be honest, it was sort of by accident. I started working on Drupal for two reasons. On the one hand, to learn more about PHP and MySQL... And on the other, I had an idea in mind and needed a “logbook” for that.
So I thought about designing it with MySQL and PHP to learn more. Then I started adding things, restructuring the program, and giving it its famous modular structure. I added a lot of experimental features like blogs. At the time, blogs didn’t have that name yet. They were called “public journals,” and RSS feeds were being defined. In some ways, Drupal was initially an experimental platform to discover and test different types of technologies.
I put a website online named Drop.org, which was the “public face” of these experiments. This site attracted a large number of people, interested and excited about the future of the web. At the time, Drop.org worked exactly like Digg-like sites. Anyone could submit articles and vote; the best stories were displayed on the main page. And people started posting suggestions such as: “If you change the algorithm like this, the votes will be of better quality.” At some point, I practically said: “Thank you for all the suggestions, but I have my own agenda — I want to work on whatever I feel like — but it would be great if you could work on things you’re passionate about.” That’s how we decided to make the website’s source code available.
4. If the concept of open source were to disappear tomorrow, what impact would that have on the Internet?
I think it would be terrible. Obviously, a large portion of the Internet is powered by open source. One of the things we did at Acquia was to build a robot to crawl all the existing sites and do a sort of fingerprinting to know how many sites use Drupal versus WordPress, Joomla, or a bunch of other CMSs. More than 10% of the world’s sites are managed by Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla — just those three. And all three are open source CMSs, so just removing these three CMSs would mean losing 10% of websites.
And it’s not just about CMSs, because most websites run on Apache or MySQL. Even at large companies like Google. Indeed, even if they can’t open source their search algorithms, a lot of their support code uses open source components. Some of the largest companies in the world are really riding the open source wave.
5. You mentioned other CMSs similar to yours. Where do you see Drupal’s position among these CMSs?
I think what sets Drupal apart from the others is that it really is a platform. If you look at WordPress, it’s really good for blogs. Joomla, on the other hand, is really good for creating small sites, corporate websites. That’s where those two CMSs excel. That doesn’t mean they can’t be used for other things... but I think Drupal is unique because it can be used for very small to very large sites. People use Drupal for all kinds of purposes. Some of the biggest sites in the world use Drupal — like the White House website, which, I think, brings together functionalities that are too different and too complex for the other CMSs.
What all these providers have in common is that they have changed the way people design websites. All these open source CMSs compete with paid CMSs. We win on price, since open source is cheaper, and I think we’ve also recently started to win on features... The reason is that the open source development model allows us to keep up with rapid changes in web technologies. It’s really hard for a commercial organization with 30 or even 50 developers to keep up. New services are launched every day. Having a community of several thousand developers lets us keep pace with the rate of innovation.
6. You are the head of Drupal, an open source project based on volunteering, and you are also the founder of Acquia, a company that sells products and services related to Drupal. How do you balance these interests?
It’s actually very easy. What’s best for Drupal is what’s best for Acquia. In fact, Acquia can’t be very successful if Drupal itself isn’t. So our interests are very similar.
7. You recently published a blog post about the role of commercialization in open source projects. What do these interests add to or take away from projects?
One of the things learned from Drupal is that commercial interests are beneficial. But they need to be managed correctly. For example, I think the main reason for Drupal’s success is the community. I also think the reason we have such a community is that many companies resell services around Drupal. They use Drupal to build websites for their clients. So it’s a tool that allows people to make money, and because they make money with Drupal, they invest and contribute to the project because their business depends on it.
This may mean that development is often driven by commercial interests. That’s a very good thing because it gives us the speed we have. What’s important is that decision-making and leadership are not influenced by commercial interests... we need to base our decisions on technical merit, because that’s what’s important for Drupal’s long-term success, not just because it’s commercially interesting.
This is something we have always taken into account and which, I think, has always been well balanced. Every decision about Drupal is discussed democratically.
What do you think of Buytaert’s comments? Open Source in general? His approach to Drupal? Let us know in the comments below.
* Adaptation of the interview with Dries Buytaert published on Mashable.com on November 1, 2010.
http://mashable.com/2010/11/01/dries-buytaert-interview/