| Drupal Founder Earns $7 Million in VC Funding |
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| Monday, 14 January 2008 | |
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Drupal's founder Dries Buytaert has launched a new company called Acquia that has picked up $7 million in venture capital funding. (Apparentl the new name is meant to refer to "aqua" and Drupal's original meaning of "drop of water").
What Will the New Company Do?In short their aim is to:
"build a company that develops a number of Drupal distributions and that offers electronic services that make Drupal easier to use and manage."
Is This Good News for Drupal?
However, not everyone is convinced that this is a move without major risks. A long thread has thrashed out the issues on the Drupal forums and CMSWatch commented that:
"large raucous communities don't always cotton to even the hint of one of their members assuming a leadership mantle (or oversized share of profits) out of the blue. It's one thing when a commercial company founds a project (c.f., Zope or Alfresco) and then has to negotiate the reins with the community they fervently hoped would join the project. It's quite another for a highly distributed community to ingest a sizable commercial firm without feathers getting ruffled. I won't go out on a limb and predict the kind of turmoil and forks that befell Mambo and threaten Joomla! even today. But if you have staked your website, or even your start-up, on Drupal, you'll want to watch your interests very closely as this unfolds."
Comments (5)
  written by Good Web Practices, January 15, 2008
Interesting piece of news yeah, thanks for sharing it with us Steve.
I see the attraction from the VC side... I suppose we need to wait and see where this takes Drupal before we draw conclusions...  written by Steven Johnson, January 15, 2008
This sounds great for Drupal and Acquia!
Curious if they have will have anything in place to keep the open source community and private company on the same page. Is it possible that in a couple of years the two might not see eye to eye and have a Mambo / Joomla style fork? Anyway cograts to them. It is almost always good when you receive a 7 figure check!  written by Gavin Doolan, March 13, 2008
Yeah I didn't know about this till I read it here. I am very interested in Drupal and have strayed away from Joomla for various reasons. I have even been looking at expression engine which is commercially owned.
I wish Dries all the best and hope that it doesn't cause too much of a riffe in the community. written by Bernard, May 14, 2008
Very interesting. Looks like there is abundant VC for web based projects at the moment. A bit like the days of the .com boom...
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Finally it looks like we may have an answer to the question I posed last year: 
Quite possibly. A move like this if far from unusual in the CMS world. In fact, its almost the norm nowadays for Open Source projects to be backed by a commercial company. 
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Given this past year's GPL debacle, I think I agree with you that this type of thing would be unlikely with Joomla!, but you never know. Anything is possible.