Dries Buytaert, Drupal's project leader, has just unveiled his latest Drupal project...Mollom. Mollom's goal is to be an automated content monitoring system with one of its initial services geared toward providing a spam filter and CAPTCHA server for websites.

Dries Buytaert: Mollom, my content monitoring startup -

After several months of private beta testing, Benjamin Schrauwen and I are happy to unveil Mollom, your partner in automated content monitoring. Mollom's purpose is to dramatically reduce the effort of keeping your websites clean and the quality of their user-generated content high. Currently, Mollom is a spam-killing, one-two punch combination of a state-of-the-art spam filter and CAPTCHA server. We are experimenting with automated content quality assessments, but these are still in an early testing phase.

CMSReport.com is one in a number of Drupal sites that have been "secretly" testing Mollom over the past several months. Since installing Mollom, I've been able to sleep at night knowing that Mollom is watching over my site. The amount of time I spend on moderating anonymous comments for potential spam has been significantly reduced thanks to Mollom. This is good stuff from Dries Buytaert and Benjamin Schrauwen!

"I guess I don't have to repeat that Drupalcon Boston 2008 attracted 800 drupalians. So eventhough the room for Dries [Buytaert's] keynote this morning was huge, it was packed."

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Drupal's project leader gives his yearly predictions on the advances Drupal will make in the 2008 year. Lots of good stuff coming for the content management system.

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I just completed one of the most exhausting days at work I've had since switching over from operations to IT. Everyone wanted a "minute of my time" which translates in the real world to 20 minutes (if I was lucky). The last thing I really wanted to do after work was touch a computer. Yet, I find myself too excited to not type about some great news.

What is the good news? Dries Buytaert, project leader for Drupal, is starting his first Drupal startup. The working name for the company is Acquia.

Thus, I'm starting a Drupal company whose current working name is 'Acquia'. Acquia's software products will include a number of Drupal distributions -- for community networks, digital media properties, corporate websites, and others. In addition to providing Drupal distributions, Acquia will build the Drupal-tuned analogue of the RedHat Network, over which we can deliver a wide variety of electronic services intended to be useful to people developing and operating Drupal websites. An example such service is an automated upgrade/update service, an uptime and performance monitoring / reporting service, a configuration management service, etc.

Does anyone else see the irony in Drupal's founder not beginning his first Drupal startup until seven years after releasing Drupal publicly? Think of all the developers, IT leaders, and companies that have prospered over the years from Drupal. In all that time, Dries has been very careful to not benefit more than others in the Drupal community. All in all, I think Dries has shown the highest respect for open source as well as loyalty to the Drupal community.

Already, some of the other CMS news related sites are wondering how the Drupal community will react to Dries' announcement. Comparisons are already being made to other open source CMS projects that have been torn between commercial and community interests. Take this CMS Watch post for instance:

I'm hoping that later today the American version of ComputerWorld will carry the Dries Buytaert article I came across on their Australian site.  The article is an interview with Dries and titled, "Drupal: from a drop in the ocean to a big fish in the CMS World".  Yes, it's a catchy title for the interview, but I like sub-heading even more.

Drupal’s founder, Dries Buytaert tells all about the Drupal project: its history, where it is today and where it is going.

Perhaps if this is a "tell all" interview...Dries is finally hitting celebrity status and we'll soon be finding articles about him at TMZ.com instead of ComputerWorld?  :-)

Actually, the interview is quite good and I like the fact that beyond Drupal 6, Dries is pretty conservative about predicting Drupal's future.  It's best to keep us all guessing.

"Right now, Drupal's hardest challenge is to manage its explosive growth. We have raw and untampered ambition but we're left wondering how we can scale our infrastructure with the available resources, how we can attract more top-talent to help get all the work done, how to maintain -- and raise -- the high quality of our work, and how to make Drupal easier to work with. We're also learning how to deal with legal issues, we're figuring out how to better market ourselves, and how to efficiently organize large conferences."
 
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"Less and less, we're competing based on terms of functionality (open source CMS or not).  Not features but ease of use, aesthetics,  support, security, community, and documentation...will be critical differentiators."

- Dries Buytaert, "State of Drupal", 2007 Open Source CMS Summit and DrupalCon, Yahoo! Campus
 

Hopefully everyone will see the humor and irony of this post. I was visiting Dries Buytaert's blog this afternoon and then visited CNET's News page. What I observed this afternoon from those sites is either coincidence or ruthless strategic planning from the open-source community.

Buytaert posted on his blog about a recent interview he did as project leader of the Drupal CMS for a Belgian business magazine. Evidently the article paints a picture that Buytaert is the "anti-Bill Gates". Buytaert, through his post, indicates that he isn't too comfortable with the magazine's perception of him being anti-Microsoft.

The irony is that CNET reports that Bill Gates is stepping down from his full-time role at Microsoft, the company Gates founded. The article indicates that Gates is leaving Microsoft to use the time to pursue charity work: