Bryght started with a simple idea: what if we could take a powerful, complex framework like Drupal and make it available to everyone... with or without technical expertise. This was closely related to our belief that eventually static HTML pages on the Internet will be replaced by dynamic pages. Dynamic pages means web applications.

We've seen a lot of this occur over the past several years. When we started, Drupal was making the transition from Drupal 4.4 to 4.5. Multisite was just a glimmer in people's eyes, and the concept of install profiles was nowhere to be seen. Bryght worked on Drupal core to include multisite capability out of the box: all of a sudden, it was a bug if a module didn't support operating in a multisite environment.

Drupal-as-framework was in a much different state back then. Developers constantly hit cases where the core code didn't have enough "hooks and interfaces" to cleanly override everything. We ended up building a series of tools and daemons around Drupal in order to enable mass hosting. This tool is called HostMaster, and is Bryght's answer to mass hosting Drupal. It's built around Python and PostgreSQL, and has had the concept of "install profiles" for about 2 years. We originally had dreams of perhaps licensing or otherwise making money directly off this code. But in reality, this concept is foreign to our open source beliefs: the bits don't matter. Eventually, we put HostMaster under the GPL and made it available at https://svn.bryght.com/hostmaster (yes, you still need to request an account).