Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal, is running for president.
No, not that presidency. The presidency of the Drupal Association, the organization that oversees the development of Drupal.
It's somewhat astonishing that Buytaert should have to campaign for a position that he so clearly has already earned, but it's also a testament to the meritocracy that is open source, as well as to Buytaert's own humility, that he feels compelled to do so, anyway.
And so Buytaert writes up a list of reasons why the Drupal community should vote for him, including this one:
Despite our extensive activities in 2008, the Drupal Association has been held back by the lack of more active contributors, and particularly, contributors in some key areas of our organization.
One role of the president is to lend focus to particular areas where the project should focus, to draw attention to the areas of the project that might be somewhat dysfunctional, and to bring in leadership to address these problems.
Given that, I want to outline a few of the areas where I want to push the Drupal Association and where I believe we should extend the current team.
Imagine if we had that level of candor, transparency, and humility in our national governments!
Buytaert's campaign may be a foregone conclusion, but it's also a reminder of how powerful the open-source ethic can be.
My vote is with Buytaert for Drupal's president. Yours?
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Dries Buytaert in Brussels
(Credit: Matt Asay)Dries Buytaert celebrates his thirtieth birthday today. For someone that has built an open-source community that numbers in the millions of downloads and hundreds of thousands of contributors, Dries is a very unassuming, interesting, and likable person.
It's even more impressive to me that Dries wrote Drupal in his spare time as a PhD student in Belgium. Bonus points for doing it in PHP, despite the fact that most of his academic work has related to Java.
Businessweek paid homage to Dries earlier this year, naming him a "2008 top innovator." It's a nice honor, one that I'd love to have.
But for me the real measure of Dries' success is the thousands of cool websites that run Drupal, a number of which Dries has profiled on his blog.
Actually, the real measure of Dries' success is that he remains a good person despite the success. I was in Belgium last year and we sat down for gyros and frites, and dug deep into the metrics and methods for open-source success. I learned a lot, and loved spending time with him.
Happy birthday, Dries. You deserve it!
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 MoreIt's very cool to see Dries Buytaert, co-founder of Acquia and founder of Drupal, listed on Businessweek's list of the world's top technology entrepreneurs. The story of Drupal - started by Dries in his spare time - is amazing, and testifies to the power of open source.
Great work, Dries. You deserve it.
I have a huge amount of respect for Dries Buytaert, founder of the Drupal project (and potential new member of the Aquia team, which is a stealth-mode startup funded by North Bridge Venture Partners and focused on monetizing Drupal). When you've been involved in open source for a few years, you realize just how amazingly hard it is to create a project that can attract thousands of developers and tens of thousands of users.
Yet Dries has done just that. The thing I love most about Drupal is its Firefox-like plug-in community. Dries architected Drupal in such a way as to make add-ons easy and fun, and the result is that Drupal has a wide array of them. More importantly, he attracted a community that wanted to build these extensions.
In this PC World interview, he talks about how it came about, and ends up giving some great pointers on how to build a successful open-source project, including why he chose PHP (which I've covered before):
... Read More
In this tenth installment of the Open Source CEO Series, I shifted gears again to talk with someone that has chosen not to carry the CEO title, despite ample opportunity to claim it. (I know a range of VCs who would love to invest in Drupal.) Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, is Linus-like in his ability to build an amazing community without undue concern for commercializing his success. I think he's one of the most interesting people in open source, given what he's accomplished and what he continues to forego in terms of cash and publicity.
I caught up with Dries on his way to the O'Reilly Foo Camp. Here's a guy who has created one of the world's best open source web content management systems...yet I bet no one will recognize him at the airport...or even at FOO.
Name, position, and company of executive
... Read More
Dries Buytaert, Founder and Project Lead, Drupal. Dries blogs here.
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