OStatic

We've recently written about potentially far-reaching moves by the U.S. government to switch significant parts of its internal software infrastructure to open source. First, the news came out that Whitehouse.gov is now based on the open source Drupal content management system (which OStatic runs on too), then the U.S. Department of Defense announced its plans to move to open source software components and platforms.

When the news broke about Whitehouse.gov and Drupal (and the Obama administration has indicated intent to run other government sites with Drupal), my first thought was that Acquia, which provides commercial support for Drupal, might see some valuable support contracts from the government. InfoWorld's Savio Rodrigues takes the idea one step further, though, and I'm inclined to agree with him.

As GigaOm notes, San Francisco-based startup Engine Yard has raised $19 million in a third round of venture capital funding from DAG Ventures, Bay Partners, and Presidio Ventures (a Sumitomo Corporation company). The investment follows a total investment of $18.5 million in the company in 2008 from Benchmark Capital and other investors, one of which was Amazon.

Engine Yard offers a cloud-based hosting environment for Ruby on Rails applications.? Ruby on Rails is an open source software framework that underlies Twitter and many other well-known applications. You can find many notable applications based on it at Open Source Rails. With substantial funding under its belt, Engine Yard's next move may be to expand its support and services business, a la Red Hat.

Undoubtedly, the open source project Drupal is one of the most robust content management systems (CMS) around. It provides the infrastructure and manages processes for many well-known web sites, including The Onion, Fast Company, InfoWorld and OStatic. We've had a great experience with it, and many large media companies are migrating to it and saving money. In our interview with Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal, he described the core contributors to the project as on the same scale as the Linux kernel. There are also over 2,000 modules for Drupal, making it hugely extensible.

Since OStatic's inception, we've collected many good resources for both getting started with Drupal, and extending its functionality if you already use it. Here is our latest update to that ongoing collection--eight great resources, including interviews with Drupal insiders.

We've reported?a number of times before?on Acquia, which offers a commercially supported version of the open source Drupal?content management system. OStatic runs on Drupal, and Drupal version 6 is expected to soon run over 240,000 web sites,? with many large media companies switching to it.

In a post just yesterday,?we discussed the proven business model of support and services for open source software that Red Hat has built, and how Acquia, Cloudera, Eucalyptus Systems, and other commercial open source companies are pursuing the same model. Until now, though, even though the company has gotten healthy venture capital funding, it hasn't been easy to tell how privately held Acquia is doing. Here are some new details.

Recently I got to talking open source with a friend of mine who has worked in the proprietary database market, especially at Sybase, for several years. He made a few interesting observations during the conversation. For example, we talked about open source competition in databases, and he said a few good things about MySQL, but also said that the proprietary databases often outdo MySQL based on just a few small features, and also commitment to legacy systems that many companies have. His take on what Oracle might do with MySQL is that it might treat it as an open source on-ramp to its own proprietary databases, but that Oracle will have to keep MySQL like WordPad --Microsoft's text editing application, which falls far short of the features found in Microsoft Word.

When we got down to discussing business models for successful commercial open source companies, my friend especially liked the Red Hat model of providing support and services for free software, which has provided the company with substantial financial success, and also consistency. There are quite a few companies following the Red Hat model, and there are also signs appearing that that model will end up immeasurably improving important open source software applications and platforms--not just business bottom lines.