A small test to see how the Youtube / Google adsense referral program is working:

Wowsers, the Startup of Dries and Jay acquired 7M US dollar according to The Journal of New England Technology. While I wish Dries and Jay all that they need to get all that they want, I would not start a company if I needed that amount, its smells like the DotCom is back to me. Still, good for them!

BTW:

Acquia developed Drupal [...]

In related news, the pope invented Jezus.

So everybody and his uncle Bob know that Dries Buytaert and Jay Batson will start a new company called Acquia based upon services around the Drupal CMS. Dries tries too hard IMHO to make clear that this will not influence the development of Drupal in any way. Too hard since everybody who knows Drupal or Dries know that this can not and will not take place.

It can not because no matter how big Dries is (and I think he is one of the smartest persons I ever met) the Drupal project has grown bigger then Dries is. And this is probably the biggest compliment Dries can get; he is so smart he can become bigger then his own shadow.

And it will not happen, Dries has proven over the last 7 years to be very trustworthy and has always chosen for the community all his life; in fact he made the community.

Getting back to their new startup, Acquia. I think it is a very good name and shows that you don’t have to pay zillion of dollars (or thousands of Euros) to come up with a very good name. They did not choose for using Drupal.com (owned by Dries) or another DrupalsShop.TLD name (legal since Dries owns the trademark) but got more creative. Using Aqua (water) in the name shows they are aligned with the Drupal (drop) community. "Don't describe—distinguish". More then that, they cleverly (or unintentional) have a couple of smart things in their name.

1. The Q in Acquia: associated with quality. Compaq (compatibility and quality) spend a lot of money of coming up with this "Q".
2. The UI in Acquia, standing for User Interface. The lack of a good UI in Drupal is one of the things that has been holding back the wide deployment of Drupal in the corporate world. Dries has been working on improving the UI ever since the first release and while there has been much improvement, there is still room for more.
3. The IA in Acquia, standing for Information Architecture. Drupal has always had a very good data model and has always dropped the legacy if the data model could be improved.

By having Drupal alignment in the name, quality, user interface and information architecture, Acquia shows what it is, even if it was unintentional. Best of luck to Dries and Jay, with a name like Acquia I am sure you will be heading for success. That and the fact that some smart people work there as well.

A few days ago an article on ZDNet.com showed up called "What should be proprietary in open source?"

Your good name. Trademark it. Protect your Web site registration. You can’t protect your code, but if someone wants to fork it they can do it under another name.

Oddly enough, it explicitly names Drupal

One reason is innovation can happen there. As at Bitnami. They’ve built simple stacks of popular open source applications, like WordPress and Joomla and Drupal.

And that is why the Drupal Community has an association: to serve and protect. Serve the community by making sure it has the needed resources to get the job done, as hardware, infrastructure and tooling. The other side of the Janus head is to protect.

1. Protect the GPL code from being misused
2. Protect the documentation and logo's from being illegally copied and
3. Protect the brandname from getting stolen

If you look at the footer on drupal.org you will see there is trademark notice pointing towards the owner of the TradeMark, Dries. Dries explains on his blog why he did this, he owns it, the Drupal Association is protecting it. Since the Association is full with passionate people who know a lot about marketing, code, databases and infrastructure, we need some help. And on Dries second post he explains that we have the best we can have on our side; the Software Freedom Center who will help us with legal issues we /will/ run into sooner or later. This might be proprietary programs using our GPL code or even getting accused by SCO alike companies claiming we violated a patent or re-used code from them.

It is funny to see this come all together and good to know that we are prepared.

Kieran -on behalf on the Drupal Association- started an experiment with Google ads on Drupal.org. Currently it is only on the paid-services and hosting pages.

Personally I would be fine with running skypscraper format on all forum pages but this is just a temporary test to see how the Association can make some much money without giving the community the feeling that Drupal.org will become a linkfarm. There are lots of less irrelevant ads now, about Typo3 and Joomla related services for example so if you are a Drupal service provider, you might want to sign up at Google and run a dedicated ad on drupal.org. A good way to gain some attention and helping the Drupal community as well.

While we are on the subject of money and advertising, the Drupal Association had some positive news, a Google Summer of Code cheque, the price money from the Packt CMS award and a small profit from the DrupalCon in Barcelona. This money will be spend -amongst others- on hardware and covering maintenance costs of running Drupal.org.

BTW: if you are in to "Advertising 2.0", be sure to read IBM's statement on how the advertising will change the couple of years.