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.

Like Dries, I believe the future of Drupal lies in distributions. Why? It allows us to concentrate and capture the right bundle of features, configuration, and theming into a customized solution for different audiences. Yes, we WILL see a "pro blogger" distribution that can effectively compete with MovableType and Wordpress. Yes, there WILL be a Windows-optimized "intranet" distribution that will be great for departments to just plug into their local network. With the current Drupal core, it kind of serves NO audiences, and distributions (like CivicSpace, or perhaps Ubercart) can focus and serve a particular audience. Did I mention that my title here is VP of Product Development? Well, it is, and distributions are Drupal products!

The net effect of such supported and maintained distributions will be twofold.

One, it will raise the quality level of contributed modules that are included in distributions. One of the things we're doing here at Raincity Studios is starting to make an inventory of all the contributed modules we use, and the ones that are deployed on client sites. I'd like to get all of them to gold star level.

Secondly, as distribution developers try new and novel things, we'll see the core API of Drupal being stretched. We'll find the holes and limits, and contribute patches to make the core more solid and more flexible. And maybe we'll find a better way of doing certain things, whether on the module level or otherwise, which will make it directly into core. The release schedule for major Drupal versions is about to get a lot more interesting :P

So, as one of the founders (James, Adrian, and Roland being the others) of the first commercial company focusing exclusively on Drupal, let me welcome Dries and Acquia. I'm looking forward to even more great work that will drive the entire platform forward.

P.S. First post on the RCS site!

P.P.S. I'm behind in announcing that Adrian committed our mass hosting / provisioning / upgrading platform, HostMaster2 to Drupal CVS; see the Hostmaster project page for more details, and a longer post to follow. It's somewhat relevant as it has components that are useful in upgrading local and remote Drupal sites, which is one of the things Acquia says they are going to work on :P