Foster simplicity in the midst of complexity, and charge people for that service. I assume it will work for Acquia, too.

“I love my CMS!” is rarely heard when it comes to web site management, so it’ll be fun to watch Acquia help the overall Drupal community service that lack of love.

"That is a system that would have cost a half a million dollars...The stuff that I am able to build with Drupal that scales and handles load and does the kind of stuff I am want to do is just mind-blowing. And I find it very easy to use."

OStatic: Acquia is working on a commercially supported version of Drupal. What do you think of that effort?

I think it is a natural step and a sign that Drupal is maturing. The explosive growth that Drupal has seen in the last five years is only helped by having the perceived legitimacy that a commercially supported version provides. Though Drupal is often used internally by IT teams, having the option of a commercial name behind it can bring more confidence to that decision and grow the Drupal community at the same time.

In other words, there's still an open world of community-supported Drupal for those that value cash over time and other resources. But for those that wouldn't mind a shortcut to Drupal-based productivity, there's Acquia Drupal.

Collaboration and social networking are driving the fortunes of a pair of up-and-coming open source platforms. In content management for the Web, Drupal is conquering new territory as companies look to build Web sites designed from the ground up to support social interaction. On the enterprise content management front, Alfresco has made collaboration and interoperability the keystones of its platform.

I wasn’t sure how big the Acquia opportunity would be when I first heard about it from Dries, but it looks like a great opportunity for the company and for the Drupal community. I wish them the best of luck.

By any standard, Drupal is a FOSS success story, with more than 900 contributors to the recently announced version 6.0, and some 1,800 modules supplementing the core functionality.

As to Drupal, it has effectively become to web portals what Eclipse is to application development, and has the potential to significantly challenge Microsoft's Sharepoint or similar commercial portal applications in that space.

I try to encourage brands to embrace both the negative and positive discussions their consumers have, preaching that it's important to learn from the negative and leverage the positive.

But for all of those brands that don't want to build the roads that provide more interaction with their consumers, your consumers are taking other roads already available. Enable them to speak freely with and about you. They're going to do it, no matter what, either way.

That's social publishing.