You probably saw all of these articles already but ... in case you missed any ... get comfy, pour a beverage and do some reading about Open Source CMSs in the news:

Drupal and The Future of News

Tech writer Kurt Cagle from Open Source Pixels {cribbed article bio: managing editor of XML.com, lives in Victoria, British Columbia, and is beginning to wonder what happened to summer - Ed note: Ditto on the summer ;-)} offers a wide-ranging narrative about his experiences with Drupal, (including a name-check of Bryght/Raincity Studios) in his June 1, 2008 article. Well worth a read for his interesting historical and technical perspectives.

Another round of congrats to Dries and Jay for getting their Series A funding of $7M dollars for Acquia.

Dries says we might be thinking that's a lot of money -- nope, I don't think that! Our shared Drupal platform is something that is starting to compete with very large solutions and very large companies: we need well funded companies in our ecosystem to continue to help things grow. But also, to start spending some marketing dollars and to the "non development stuff" that it is very hard to do within an open source community.

It's great also to hear more from Acquia CEO Jay Batson. I met him at OSCMS 2007, where he had to pull some strings to be one of the last people into that oversold event. As the picture at left shows, he's a real person :P I'm sure the whole Drupal community will be interested in learning more about him over time.

I'm still working on what our combined team will look like here at Raincity Studios, as well as helping move a couple of projects out the door, but my role as VP of Product Development will likely align very closely with some of the development that Acquia is sure to embark on. Making Drupal easier and more usable, getting supported code from contrib over time, and helping with change management issues are just a few off the top of my head.

So -- congrats on the Series A from everyone here at Raincity Studios. Looking forward to the next round!

Well, it's about time.

Dries is finally done with his PhD work, and is kicking off Acquia, his commercial Drupal startup company. Dries' write up is fairly extensive, but there is also a FAQ on the Acquia site.

Dries explains that Acquia will focus on "Drupal distributions". I'd like to think that myself and the team at Bryght pioneered the concept of Drupal distributions: we've been running them as part of our mass hosting system since January 2005. It took a few more years to get "install profiles" into the core of Drupal, with the release of Drupal 5. There is still a ton of work to be done in improving the base infrastructure / code / APIs for install profiles, but it's the right direction.

Dries Buytaert, head of the Drupal project, just announced that he will be down in San Francisco at the end of June for a Drupal Road Trip. I've been talking with both Dries and Jeff Robbins of Lullabot about the continued growth of the Drupal community, and I'll be joining them and Zack Rosen of CivicSpace in San Francisco. Jeff took the lead and organized this trip to connect Dries with a lot of interesting people in the Bay Area.

I made an introduction to SpikeSource, someone that we've been working with for some time now. We'll meet with them and talk about the role of SpikeSource and other commercial vendors in providing verified install profiles. SpikeSource has also shown an interest in training (Lullabot!) as well as working with the community on a testing framework.

Why is this happening? Well, as mentioned above, Jeff Robbins is the one who is getting Dries to San Francisco and is setting up all the meetings. He has some ideas around usability and multi-lingualism for Drupal, and ideally some funding for these initiatives. Dries wrote a great paragraph on what he hopes to get out of the trip:
These meetings will give me a chance to talk to these people about what is happening with Drupal and the Drupal community, and get a chance to promote all the great work we've done together. We're going to try and make sure that Drupal can be a little more connected with the larger FOSS community. Maybe it will open up further possibilities for collaboration and support. As always, we'll let things go naturally. Most importantly, I hope to learn from these people and that alone is going to be an invaluable experience.

Better late than never, check out Dries's presentation on Drupal 4.7 and beyond (8MB MP3 file, recorded October 18, 2005, 16 minutes and 27 seconds). More info (effectively the show notes!) can be found on my blog post about Dries's Drupal 4.7 presentation