Vice versa

Dries Buytaert creator of Drupal

Dries Buytaert, creator of the very successful software package Drupal used by thousands of web developers, including the White House,  is relocating from Antwerp to Boston, Massachusetts.  We had an opportunity to interview him right before he moved to the United States for a period of two years to take care of his company Acquia.

myAmerica: Drupal is your brain child, right, which developed into a worldwide system?  How did it all originate?

Dries: I was a student at the University of Antwerp.  This was 1999, early 2000.  Basically, I had a need for a message board  ñ a system to exchange messages with other students.  At the same time, I wanted to learn more about php/mysql, the technology Drupal is built on.  The combination of these two reasons --  the need for a message board and the desire to learn some new technologies  -- made me develop a message board that evolved into a full blown content management system (CMS) over time .  The very first version of Drupal was released in 2001, after I had worked on it for over a year, really.

myAmerica: You are still very young.  How old were you at that time?

Dries:  I must have been 21 or 20.

myAmerica: This is a typical success story, right?  A young guy who develops some new technology in a garage.  

Dries: Yes, except that in my case the garage was a message board.

myAmerica: How do you explain the success of Drupal?  It has become a really big system used all over the world.  What are some of Drupalís unique features?

Dries: I think itís a combination of many different things. Just to name a few features. One of the things Drupal has been successfully doing is build a developer community.  Typical for Drupal is that it is relying on developers.  Itís very unique to Drupal and open source that we have been building a large community around the product.  There are over 10,000 developers that develop Drupal.  It is very important for it drives adoption. Closed source providers to not have this.  Even our biggest competitors have an engineering department of only 100 or 200 engineers.  The fact that we use such a large developer community is key to Drupal's success.

There is also a number of technological advantages.  Drupal is unique in a couple of ways. One.  It is one of the few platforms that scales from very small web sites --say $5/week hosting accounts -- to really very big sites.  It is a platform, a solution.   Two.  The other thing is that Drupal can be used in a variety of ways.  Some people use Drupal to maintain a personal blog.  Others use Drupal for e-learning or to power their corporate intranet site.  You can very much use it to build any type of web site.

myAmerica: The White House is also using Drupal.  What went through your head when the White House decided to go with Drupal?

Dries: Obviously, I was very excited at that time.  Actually, several USG offices were already using Drupal before the White House.  Drupal was not entirely new to the USG, but obviously this was a huge win for Drupal.  It validates the platform.  There is a million visitors using the site at a time.  So, security is also very important for such a site.  So, I was super excited when that happened.  My company Acquia was even more excited.

myAmerica:  On the Acquia web site you urge people to "stop the ìtyranny of proprietary software." How do you see the future of open source vs. proprietary software?

Dries:  We can talk for hours on this topic.  Ultimately, open source software offer better value propositions to customers. Proprietary software depends on the vendor.  If you are using proprietary software and you are unhappy with the vendor, you are in a very unfavorable situation.  With open source itís different.   It puts the power with the user, not with the vendor.   If you are not happy with the current vendor, you can take your source code with you and take it to another Drupal shop.

myAmerica: More generally, how do you see the future of web sites?

Web 3.0 is all about interoperability, meaning, that sites will start exchanging more information and much more easily.  It is the next level of  .  The Semantic Web technology will be a big part of this. Tim Berners-Lee says that we are evolving from a world wide web or WWW as we know it today to a giant global graph or GGG.   The web is evolving into one giant platform that can be searched by machines.   This is still difficult to do in todayís world.  Html does not provide a lot of structure.  It makes sense to us human beings because we can see structures, but to machines a url is a url.

The future of the web is where we provide the right type of structure to machines, like crawlers, so that they can interpret all of these data, they can combine.  For example, take a  site that announces open positions.  If this information were available in a structured format, we could build a search engine of all the jobs in the world. This is only one example.  Itís incredibly powerful.  And thatís going to be a big part of the future.

Another answer to that question relative to Drupal is that, I think, because Drupal is open source and we have such a large developer community, we are building a lot of modules, also called extensions.  That too is a very powerful notion.  We have 7,000 modules today.  Commercial vendors do not have the resources to build all these modules.  Only a few years ago, and still today, developers were writing code by hand.  Now the role of the developers is changing as a result of Drupal and other open source systems.  Their role is more one of assembling than of developing web sites.  This is really empowering.  This is really going to help democratize web site development.  Thatís exciting as well. I see it happening.

myAmerica: Do you wish to mention any project you are working on right now?

Dries: Not specifically.  Since we did the White House web site we have been working with lots of government agencies, all over the world, but obviously also in the United States.  

myAmerica: We would also like to ask you a more personal question.  Many Belgians move to the US at some point in their career.  To many of them, the US is a land of opportunity.  You are also relocating to the US.  Do you consider the US a land of opportunity?

Dries:  Yes, I guess so.  There are several reasons why we are moving to the United States.  One. My company is ased in Boston.  The first seven years I was working on Drupal on my spare time.  Drupal was a hobby project.  It was not until two years ago that we decided to make my hobby into a full time job.  I also thought that if we wanted to take Drupal to the next level, we had to provide certain services and create a company.  I started to look around.  Where should we start the company? How should we do it?  We had to raise the money.  Also, the customer base in the US is larger than in Europe.  And obviously it makes sense to start the company where most of the customers are.  And it also made sense to start the company in the Boston area.

Two.  My wife has a degree in microbiology.  She has accepted a research position at Broad Institute, a genomics research center and spinoff of MIT and Harvard, also in the Boston area.  Itís a great opportunity for her as well.  The combination of these two reasons is really why we are moving.

Also, it will be easier on the family.  I will allow me to cut down on traveling.  All these things combined makes this a very natural thing to do, itís a great opportunity for all of us.

myAmerica: Are you leaving for good?

Dries:  After two years we will re-evaluate.  I think itís a good thing to re-evaluate.  My wife has a J visa.  Itís a temporary work visa. We will have to come back and reevaluate.  My oldest son will be five in two years time.  If we want him to go to school in Belgium,  that would be a good time to come back.

myAmerica: Is there anything you will miss in the United States?

Dries:  Sure, my family and friends in Belgium, and then some of the Belgian goodies, the fries, the chocolate, the beer at affordable pricesÖ

myAmerica: We wish you all the best of luck in the United States.

More on Dries Buytaert at:

http://buytaert.net

http://acquia.com