acquia

Why is Jive bad-mouthing Drupal and Liferay?

In a somewhat Quixotic quest, Jive Software has been showcasing a white paper titled "Jive vs. Open Source" (PDF), with a page devoted to what it claims are the negatives of Drupal and Liferay.

On one hand, as CMS Watch argues, it's Marketing 101 to accentuate one's positives while highlighting the competition's weaknesses.

But by choosing to focus on open source, in general, and Drupal, in particular, Jive has effectively taken out a billboard advertisement that essentially proclaims: "We're really worried about Drupal. It's a big-time threat to our business."

No … Read more

If Google can do it...why can't you?

If there was ever a doubt as to whether open-source software could be big business, Google has eradicated it. The Silicon Valley giant shovels open-source software out the door like Santa Claus, all the while monetizing it with cloud-based services.

Google' strategy is no longer in question. What does remain a question is why more companies aren't following its lead.

Gartner analyst Brian Prentice argues:

By 2020 open source will be so conceptually and practically integrated into the way business is done that the concept of blogging on open source in 2030 will be about as interesting as predicting … Read more

White House Web site makes open-source move

The WhiteHouse.gov Web site now employs open-source software called Drupal to manage and publish its content, a high-profile endorsement for the project and the 2-year-old start-up Acquia that supports it.

Drupal is open-source software, meaning that anyone may see, modify, and redistribute the source code underlying the software that's actually installed on a computer. Specifically, Drupal is governed by the GNU General Public License. Acquia sells support for Drupal, and there are plenty of add-on modules to tailor it to particular uses.

The White House announced the move in an Associated Press story that somewhat clumsily tried explaining, &… Read more

A cloudy future for open-source applications

The best open-source projects have little problem with adoption. Their problem, increasingly, centers on monetization of their popularity. From Drupal to MySQL to Audacity, sometimes the best things in life truly are free...which can be a problem. The solution, however, may be cloud computing.

I've articulated this before, but theory met reality this past week with announcements from DimDim, an open-source Web conferencing provider, and Acquia, the focal point for Drupal support and value-adding services. Both have interesting new cloud strategies that promise to deliver customer value while funding the vendors' payroll.

DimDim, as TechCrunch reports, recently launched … Read more

Red Hat and Acquia thrive on complexity

Drupal is a fantastic Web publishing platform that derives much of its value from a disparate community of contributors, as Xconomy recently wrote. With more than 4,000 contributed modules from over 3,000 active contributors (741 of which contribute to Drupal Core), Drupal has something for everyone, which is both its greatest asset and biggest liability.

Choice is good. Too much choice, however, can be bad.

The same holds true for Red Hat, which charges a premium for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution to enterprises that want to tap into Linux but don't want the bother of … Read more

Mix and match: The perfect open-source Web commerce company

Occasionally I get brilliant ideas about whom should merge with whom in open source. OK, so it's very occasionally, but I think I'll start sharing them under a "Mix and match" headline.

Forget Fantasy Football. It's time for "Fantasy Open Source."

Over the past few weeks I've spent a fair amount of time with the Acquia team, the company that offers a commercial distribution of the ubiquitous Drupal open-source Web content management system. Drupal is very strong in Web publishing and has an amazing community following, which makes it a nice pairing … Read more

Executive moves: Acquia, Alfresco, Groundwork, and Black Duck get new leadership

While the technology industry has been laying off large numbers of employees, the open-source software industry has been hiring, at least at the executive level.

In the past week, Acquia, Alfresco, Groundwork, and Black Duck have all added executive leadership:

Acquia - Company founder Dries Buytaert announced Tom Erickson as Acquia's new CEO, replacing Jay Batson in that role. Batson will remain with the company in an as-yet undefined role. Erickson brings to Acquia a wealth of experience, including as CEO of Systinet, which he successfully sold to Mercury Interactive in 2006. Erickson is a great addition to the … Read more

Webware Radar: Preview PDFs in your browser without downloading them

Ajax DocumentViewer has released a browser helper tool that allows users to view any document in the app's quick preview option. Whenever users find a PDF or Microsoft file type in their browser, they can highlight the link and view it in the Ajax DocumentViewer without downloading it. The free tool is available now and doesn't require any registration.

Acquia, a company that provides open-source software for the Drupal content management system, announced the public beta release of its search tool Wednesday. Those who want to use it can download it from Acquia's site and install it … Read more

Acquia backs Drupal for enterprise adoption

Drupal has always been a great open-source Web content management system. Forrester called it one of the two open-source content management systems to consider. Its biggest deficiency was arguably a lack of enterprise-class support and polish to support the project.

On Tuesday, however, Acquia, the company behind Drupal, remedied this void, launching its commercially supported distribution of Drupal and a network service to provide updates and other services around the core Drupal distribution.

Acquia is taking a page out of Red Hat's playbook, boiling down the complexity of the deep and wide Drupal community. While I like the look … Read more

Open-source founders doubling up on startups

I was confused when Dave Rosenberg told me that he was leaving MuleSource to pursue a game startup. "But you are already the CEO of a startup," I remonstrated. Given his longstanding interest in video games, however, it was probably just a matter of time.

Of course, that was nothing next to my confusion when I kept reading about Digium-founder Mark Spencer hanging out with Marc Fleury, working on an open-source home automation project called OpenRemote. The OpenRemote blog suggests that Digium remains Spencer's primary home, but that he moonlights as the principal hardware designer for OpenRemote.

This morning Dries Buytaert of Drupal/Acquia fame confused me further by announcing Mollom, a "startup Benjamin Schrauwen and [Buytaert] began to help keep your website free of spam."

I asked Jeff Whatcott, vice president of Marketing for Acquia, the company that Dries co-founded, whether Dries was still fully engaged with Acquia, and he told me,… Read more