In the last year, a growing number of companies based on free and open source software (FOSS) have come out of stealth mode. One of the latest is Acquia, which provides services for organizations that use Drupal, the popular content management platform.

The folks from Acquia were in San Francisco for the LinuxWorld conference this week. Acquia, as we've covered before, has been working away on an array of support offerings and services for the powerful open source Drupal content management system (CMS).

Dries Buytaert - his recent announcement that he’s going to start a company called Acquia now that he’s in the final stage of completing his PhD from the University of Ghent.

A lot of Drupal people and organizations help promote Drupal. At Acquia, we also like to help with promoting Drupal. One of the things we've been doing since the inception of Acquia, is talking to analyst firms like Gartner, Forrester, and the 451group about Drupal, and all of Drupal's successes.
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At the Linuxworld 2008 conference, Drupal developer Barry Jaspan discusses Drupal, development, and the recent formation of Acquia, a software and services company for Drupal. This interview explores the functioning of Drupal and how its development will be complemented by Acquia.

In this interview we talk with Dries. In specific, we talk about: Building specialized commercial support for open source technology, Making cloud computing more viable for widespread use, The relationship between Drupal and Linux distros, and Lowering the barriers to the deployment of Drupal, Integrating multiple functionalities and components into one solution.

A year after going commercial, Acquia gets a new chief executive and new plans for the future.

In the year 2000, Dries Buytaert created Drupal, a freely licensed and open source tool to manage websites, as a bulletin board for his college dorm. Since Dries released the software and a community of thousands of volunteer developers have added and improved modules, Drupal has grown immensely popular.

Acquia has raised $15 million in funding and they're putting it into dev for their next gen open source content management system. A key part of that is a new cloud based service powered by Drupal 7.