Wikinews exclusive interview: Drupal founder Dries Buytaert

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.

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>> Open software developers meet at FOSDEM 2008

Open software developers meet at FOSDEM 2008

Hundreds of developers of freely licensed and open source software from all over Europe met in Brussels, Belgium this weekend for FOSDEM 2008. The 8th edition attracted considerably more visitors than previous editions, with visitors from Belgium and its neighbouring countries the Netherlands, Germany, France and the United Kingdom, but also from other European countries and even from the United States.
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.

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