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.

Over the past few years, implementing security properly has become a big issue for software applications of all stripes, including open source applications and platforms. That's why I noted with interest a couple of blog posts on the topic from leaders behind two high-profile open source projects: Firefox and Drupal. In a piece called Learning From Mozilla Security on InternetNews, Jonathan Nightingale of Mozilla's security team, who has the title Human Shield, provides some instructive examples of the lengths Mozilla goes to to keep Firefox secure (and security is the reason some people use the browser). Meanwhile, Dries Buytaert, founder of the open source Drupal content management system, has a post up on strategic steps he wants to put in place for a security team to police Drupal and its many modules.?

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.)