Acquia = RedHat for Drupal

Several key Drupal community members have gathered together with some others to form Acquia, a new commercial firm that hopes to sell subscriptions to Drupal a la RedHat’s linux distros. Acquia has already generated $7 million in funding. I notice the similarities between Acquia and rSmart, where I now work. Both are focused on the … Read more

Open Source Census

Let’s heed the call for an open source census with the open source discovery tool. We’ve long been maintaining that open source technologies are in wide—and often unrecognized—use in many organizations. Now we have an initiative and a tool to help demonstrate that claim with real numbers. I’ve submitted requests for the OSS Discovery tool … Read more

Nate Moves On

After 5 years as Portland State’s Director for Web Communications, I’ve moved on to work for The rSmart Group, a commercial provider of open source technologies working mostly in the education sector with Sakai, OSP and Kuali. To extend my engagement at Portland State with open source communities like Sakai/OSP and Drupal, I’m looking forward … Read more

UC-Davis University CMS Survey

UC-Davis just published results from a well-designed survey on university web content management system usage. Over 60% of respondents were using a web CMS and homegrown/open source systems were more common than proprietary systems.  Plone/Zope combined was the most common, followed closely by Homegrown, and then Drupal. Today, the Requirements and Evaluation committee of the … Read more