Drupal goes commercial
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 has grown organically and I think that the software has matured enough at this point that we can take it to he next level and reach out to a different class of users,” Buytaert told InternetNews.com . “In order to get there we need to do distributions and support and make it easier for people to deploy Drupal. I think the timing is right. We have a large installed base, so I think all of the stars are aligned for us to jump on this opportunity and advance Drupal to the next level.”
The commercial version of Drupal will add up to 30 additional modules to the system as well as undergo additional testing for enterprise use. Acquia also plans to offer full paid-for support for the commercial version.
Drupal is currently distributed under a GPL2 licence and Buytaert says that the commercial version will also be distributed under a GPL2 licence.
Drupal joins a number of other open source projects which have both commercial and community versions of their software available. One of the best known of these is the MySQL database which is distributed under a dual licence and offers a paid-for support version as well as the community edition.
Drupal distribution will take the core Drupal content management system and add in up to 30 additional modules from the community to expand functionality. The entire package will undergo additional testing to ensure enterprise grade stability. Acquia will also offer full technical support for their Drupal distribution. Currently open source Drupal users rely on community resources such as mailing lists and discussion forums for support.
, 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.
Comments
3 Responses to “Drupal goes commercial”
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March 3rd, 2008 @ 7:22 pm
Go Drupal! At the moment, you almost always have to add modules onto Drupal core in order to build up a working site. This can be problematic as an upgrade to one module can sometimes break others… if Acquia supports “distributions” which cater for different needs (e.g. social networking) all-in-one, this will make our lives much easier. Looking forward to their first offerings.
March 15th, 2008 @ 9:36 pm
Yeah! Go Drupal
We’ve started our own “commercial” version of Drupal called maxit. I’d be keen to see what they do to make Drupal more user-friendly.
I’ve disabled a lot of the techie-orientated features and menus and it makes a huge difference. That plus some decent CSS and suddenly Drupal becomes a powerful eCommerce, blogging or whatever system
July 11th, 2008 @ 7:59 pm
This is good news for Drupal. There is a need for both open source software and commercial software. It can be faster and easier to pay rather than do it yourself.
We sell Drupal modules for our image tools – Magic Thumb, Magic Zoom and Magic Magnify. It’s our main job, so if we didn’t charge for it, we couldn’t do it. Each customer gets 30 minutes of free tech support if they need it. That adds value, just as Acquia intends to add value.