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.