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 of its Network service, it is the Acquia Drupal distribution that I think is most newsworthy for enterprises looking to adopt Drupal. Dries Buytaert, Drupal's co-founder, explains:

(We are) releasing Acquia Drupal today. Acquia Drupal (previously code-named Carbon) is our Drupal distribution that bundles some of the best, most essential Drupal modules for building social publishing sites. Acquia Drupal is available for free, and all our bug fixes and improvements go straight to the module maintainers on Drupal.org. Acquia Drupal defines the collection of modules that you can get technical support for.

In other words, there's still an open world of community-supported Drupal for those that value cash over time and other resources. But for those that wouldn't mind a shortcut to Drupal-based productivity, there's Acquia Drupal.

It will be interesting to see how well this service takes off, and how its community reacts. As OStatic notes, Acquia's biggest competition will be the Drupal community or, rather, the developers and system integrators who currently make a living providing Drupal-based support. The response so far, however, has been positive from the Drupal community, and I think this will continue.

I suspect Acquia will do just fine as it learns to walk the line between commercial and community. Drupal is an excellent open-source project, and Acquia is filled with similarly excellent people. The marriage of the two should be a boon to enterprises that have adopted or are considering adopting Drupal.

[iertry]

I use Joomla and find it great. I could never get Drupal installed. The installation always froze and I couldn't get any help from the community. I think the Joomla community is much better.

Just my opinion.

Does anyone think this acquisition might cause the non enterprise drupal to become 'watered down' and useless?

[jwhatcott]

Iertry,

Sorry you had a poor experience with Drupal. Our goal at Acquia is to gradually improve the initial experience for users like you so you can enjoy the power of Drupal without the steep learning curve. By creating a bundle of some of the most popular Drupal software and by providing helpful and knowledgeable support, we hope to make life easier for you.

Regarding your question about an acquisition, there has been NO acquisition of anything. Drupal is community driven and owned by no one and as a member of the community, Acquia wants to keep it that way.

You have misunderstood the nature of Acquia Drupal by calling it "enterprise drupal." The code in Acquia Drupal is the same as the code on Drupal.org - it's just packaged differently for convenience and to define the boundary of what we can commercially support with affordable fixed price subscription plans. There is no "enterprise version" per se. Drupal.org is now and will forever be the source for the bleeding edge of Drupal innovation and the most comprehensive selection of Drupal source code. Acquia Drupal fills a different role by providing an integrated package of the stable and fully supported versions of the most popular subset of the entire universe of Drupal code.

I hope that clears things up. It's easy to get confused by all the different approaches to open source that are in the market today.

[Robyn_W]

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