OStatic

We've written about Acquia a number of times. Co-founded by Dries Buytaert, the founder of the Drupal content management system (which OStatic is based on), Acquia provides commercial support and services for Drupal. Now, the company has received an $8 million second round of venture financing from two of three of its existing investors, according to regulatory documents posted by the Securities and Exchange Commission. With Drupal growing like wildfire, and becoming especially popular with publishers seeking more economical content management, Acquia's total of $15 million of venture funding has it well positioned for growth.

Dries Buytaert is the founder and lead of the open source Drupal content management system, which OStatic and many other web sites are based on. He's also the co-founder of Acquia, which offers a commercially supported version of Drupal. Dries is one of the more respected pundits in all of open source, and we invited him to submit a guest post here at OStatic delivering his thoughts on the future of open source. He obliged, and you'll find his thought-provoking essay below the fold here, where he discusses eliminating middlemen, and much more. (Disclosure: Acquia is a sponsor of OStatic.)