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. Drupal won the overall Open CMS Award in 2007, and some speakers in Drupal's spacious developer's room at FOSDEM 2008 were dreaming aloud of its world domination.
Buytaert (now 29) just finished his doctoral thesis and has founded the start-up Acquia. The new company wants to become Drupal's best friend, with the help of an all-star team and US$7 million collected from venture capitalists. Wikinews reporter Michaël Laurent sat down with Dries in Brussels to discuss these recent exciting developments.
>> Click here to read the interview
>> Open software developers meet at FOSDEM 2008
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Wikinews exclusive interview: Drupal founder Dries Buytaert
Open software developers meet at FOSDEM 2008
During the two-day-long conference, presentations touched on programming languages, build systems, gaming (such as Battle for Wesnoth, Crystal Space, Globulation 2), packaging, virtualisation and web applications. The conference also has rooms were developers who usually work together via the internet can meet in real life and share thoughts on their projects; CentOS, Fedora, CrossDesktop, Drupal, GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, OpenSUSE and X.org had the biggest rooms this year. The corridors were filled with stands from organisations such as the Free Software Foundation Europe and the Free Knowledge Foundation, Debian, Ubuntu, OpenOffice.org, etc.
Since FOSDEM brings many European open software developers to Brussels, it also provides an important networking opportunity. FOSDEM kicks off Belgium-style on Friday with a beer event, but during the entire weekend several groups hold parties all over town. Wikinews reporters attended a barbecue hosted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on Friday, were it interviewed EFF and Open Rights Group representatives on the upcoming E.U. proposal to extend copyright for performers to 95 years. Wikinews also interviewed Drupal founder and Acquia CTO Dries Buytaert about Drupal and how Acquia will relate to its developer community.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Ask your question to Drupal founder Dries Buytaert
Dries Buytaert, the creator of Drupal, the freely licensed and open source content managing system, agreed to an interview with Wikinews.
Buytaert just finished his doctoral thesis and has founded the startup company Acquia.
If you have any questions about Drupal, free and open software or what's happening for him in the near future, you can post your questions on the interview preparation page or e-mail them to User:Stevenfruitsmaak .
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Wikinews interviews World Wide Web co-inventor Robert Cailliau
Photo: CERNLast January Dr. Cailliau retired from CERN, the European particle physics lab where the WWW emerged. Wikinews offered the engineer a virtual beer from his native country Belgium, and conducted an e-mail interview with him (which started about three weeks ago) about the history and the future of the web and his life and work.
History of the WWW
Mr. Cailliau talks about the challenges he faced in the early 1990s: "A lot of incomprehension, later also some jealousy. And at the start it was difficult to convince the managers that it would grow into a useful tool."
"Looking back and from the many conversations with web and internet pioneers, I think not much has changed fundamentally," Cailliau says. Nothing new under the sun: scalable vectors, style sheets and many other things that have made a breakthrough during the last year, already existed back in the early WWW days.
But not everything went as Cailliau envisioned it: "I predicted that search engines would not cope in the long term. Maybe the existence of Google is only an indication that there is still only little available on the web."
Mr. Cailliau is a man who has a strong vision, a provocateur at times: "We advanced far too fast with far too many developers who ran away in far too many different directions without much thinking. ... Especially the geeks in the U.S. often behaved like cowboys: shoot first, think later."
Web 2.0 and future directives
Robert Cailliau has edited his own Wikipedia article, and contributes from time to time (for example on Commons). "I use the Wikipedia often. I also contribute here and there. A very great work, looked at with a lot of jealousy. In almost all comments about the Wikipedia I perceive in the background some jealousy and intolerance," he says.
Cailliau strives for more international regulations on online behaviour. He criticizes the fact that websites increasingly take things into their own hands, amid the legal vacuum governments leave us with when it comes to new technologies. "We see more and more cases in which commercial companies take the law in their own hands. And that makes me worried about what the commercial sector will do in the vacuum that the governments just let be."
The WWW father also realises the potential downside of his invention. In contrast to Tim Berners-Lee, Cailliau is not a fan of the semantic web: "It's also a little early to use intelligent machinery. ... You have no idea how "half witted" machines can be. ... Maybe here too we should think and experiment first before we let the beast loose!" He expects an increasing importance for the virtual world: The Matrix, but worse.
You can read more of his ideas about the history and future of the World Wide Web, web 2.0 and wiki's and more comments in the full story on Wikinews. Mr. Cailliau has answered the questions in Dutch too, and a Dutch release of the interview is scheduled soon.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Wikinews reports from anarchist demonstration in Belgium
This Friday, I passed another exam, and to celebrate I decided to do some original reporting. Since I also contribute to the Belgian Indymedia, I got a request from the editor to cover a demonstration of squatters in my home town Leuven.
When I arrived at the rendez-vous point, I was amazed by the impressive amount of security forces present. The police had cordoned off the square in front of city hall with barb wire fence, and a police helicopter followed the movements of the crowd.
The police chased the protesters through the bushes... one was chasing me, waving his baton at me -I yelled "PRESS,PRESS!!! You wanna see my card?!" The officers looked really scared and outnumbered. So they called reinforcements: in all, 250 officers worked overtime to control less than 100 protesters (they had already arrested everyone else by then).
I followed the protesters into another squat, an empty house near the canal, where they wanted to hide out from the police. A masked anarchist teenager pulled me by the backpack, and waved a big stick at me as if he was preparing to hit me, but he wanted to here what I had to say for myself first. "Indymedia, man..." I told him, and he immediately apologised. They're all eager readers of the site, and the Indymedia press card was a welcome alternative to the Wikinews card during these protests.
They had clearly been there before, some of there stuff were stored there. But it was too dark for pictures. On leaving, I was stopped by another group of squatters, but again the Indymedia press card did the trick so I could walk out of there with no problem.
There would be no action for hours because the police was waiting for a court order, I was cold, sleepy, tore my paints while running on the ring road, and it was too dark for good pictures... I headed home to get a good night's rest before writing 'Police ends demonstration of anarchist squatters in Belgium'.
Monday, May 21, 2007
Strange events covered on Wikinews
Wikinews reporters Paul Williams and Steven Fruitsmaak report on some of the bizar events taking place in their environment...
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Original reporting at Wikinews: 3 days, 3 reports
I guess I found myself a new hobby: this week I set my first steps in becoming a freelance journalist for Wikinews. For three days in a row, I set out into the real world and covered an event with my new camera, my pen and pencil and my Wikinews press card.
Last week on Friday Messedrocker sent me my press card, but I hadn't printed it yet when I heard that the Belgian federal government was holding a summit, not in Brussels as usual but in my own home town of Leuven! So I had to go there, although I knew I couldn't get inside because the accreditation period for the press had already passed. But on Saturday morning there had been plenty of interesting events outside the summit, so I hoped this would be the case on Sunday morning too.
So I stood there in the rain, with a very poor digital camera, photographing nothing but Mercedes cars with tanned windows... finally I could only get a picture of the building where the summit was held for my article at the Dutch Wikinews.
As I watched the real professional media walking through the police line and interviewing the ministers, I thought "Man, I really got to get myself that camera." A policeman asked me: "Can you photograph anything with that thing?" He advised me to buy a Nikon D-40, and that's exactly what I did on Monday!
Almost a week later, the article is still the only real article on the Dutch Wikinews... that wiki is abandoned like a graveyard. I could do some translation, but it's really not motivating to see how little the few contributors are actually doing over there. I'm afraid it's a vicious circle for small wikis like that. While we have potentially 3x more editors than the Catalonian Wikinews, that site seems to do much better...
Later that day, I saw on the news how after I left, there was a protest at the summit... So I learned my first lesson: if you wait long enough, there'll always be something to report.
On Wednesday I took a train to Sint-Niklaas to report on the mass wedding held against racism in Belgium. I felt excited that I would finally practice some real journalism, but I also doubted, since I was surely not a professional reporter. I continued to feel humble when I arrived at the event, and had to wait in line for an interview while being surrounded by Reuters, AP, Al Jazeera, BBC News, every possible Belgium news organisation and most known European media like El País, ZDF, ... I felt a real kick when I got the best seat at the press conference and in front of the stage.
The atmosphere was hostile at times. Some other photographer who was a foot taller than me just shoved me aside when I was trying to get next to the Reuters camera filming councilor Van Bellingen, the protagonist of the story.
Furthermore, the organisation wasn't prepared for the international press, the stage and press area were to small for all crews, and things almost got out of hand when a camera man got into an argument with a spectator. But thanks to the excellent spot I had conquered in front of the stage, I was able to capture the moment suprême (pictured on the left) of the evening beautiful, in contrast to the reporters who where sent off stage when things got out of control...
I'm proud to say that my first real original report has been nominated for Featured status!
On Thursday, metropolitan Archbishop Danneels visited my university to give a lecture on health care and religion. He gave me his blessing to take a picture of him, which you can admire to the left, and in the article Belgian Archbishop lectures on health care and religion. I interviewed some of my professors, surprised my fellow students who attended the speech, and also my boss from my student job, who thought I must have been reporting for the university...
On Friday, I went to prison... to do a report on an interesting project, probably unique in Europe. 30 citizens were given the chance to freely discuss about the atmosphere of insecurity in society with detainees. At least some of the participants got a more realistic idea of prison life compared to the image they got from the media (especially Hollywood movies). You can read about it in Project brings dialogue between society and prisoners.
When I look back at this week now, I can say I found out that citizen journalism brings you to places where you normally wouldn't get in to. It makes you aware of things you normally don't even realize are taking place around you. And it teaches you how the media works: you can experience the beautiful and ugly sides, and when you read about the events you've covered in other newspapers, you realize which ones are factually accurate, and which ones will just report anything out of pure sensationalism.
