A someone who has been "active" in the Drupal community for over 8 years, it is shocking to see that only in the last 3 years Drupal was really picked up by the mainstream press. This is not due to the quality of the code of Drupal of the community, as much as it has to do with building momentum and a shake out in the CMS landscape. So this story about Drupal being in the "Top 10 coolest Open Source products" (yes, it is that time of the year again) comes as no surprise to anyone how knows the code or the community.

The real power of Drupal however is that 5 (!) other Open Source projectsof the top 10 products use Drupal as a platform to deliver their tools, empower their community. That is the real power of Drupal. 6 (including Drupal self) of the top 10 Open Source tools according to CRN.com use Drupal:

1. Ledger SMB (a fork of SQL ledger)
2. DoJo (they hacked Drupal core to get the DoJo in and JQuery out :-) )
3. Ubuntu (Linux for humans, with their famous bug 1)
4. Firefox, the best browser chrome :-) )
5. OO.org, word!

Drupal power. "We, the Drupal community" are proud :-)

When Dries (co)started his company he made sure not to step on any of the those of the community and the commercial ecosystem around Drupal. Dries stated he wanted to play it nice and offer commercial services around Drupal that would be good for Drupal, for the community, the Drupal companies that already offer (implementation/testing/education) services as well as for his investors and himself. The last two I wrote down myself but it only makes sense to add them as well :-)

Dries stated in his initial post that Acquia should be:

[...] a company that is to Drupal what Ubuntu or RedHat are to Linux.

So far, Dries and his team at Acquia have done a great job! Adding value to the code, the community and even generating opportunities for other Drupal Shops without claiming any ground where others are offering service. Acquia created their own business opportunities, something we all profit from.

One year and 2 weeks after the initial announcement (late congrats!), Acquia is more then the Ubuntu/RedHat of Drupal! Acquia is the Acquia of Drupal. And you can see this if others are referring to you like:

just as Red Hat does for the open-source Linux operating system and [...] Acquia does for the open-source Drupal content management system.

And lets not forget, is is more then anything else a compliment to the Drupal community, becomming a household name like Linux is (in some households anyway :-) )

Now if only we would be more proud on our mascot.

Gratis iPhone? Sure! Als je een PHP nerd kent die wil werken bij de grootste Open Source software implementator (en de leukste!) in Nederland, geef hem dan aan om te gaan solliciteren bij Dutch Open Projects en krijg gratis een iPhone.

Moet de nerd(in) wel aangenomen worden en door zijn proeftijd komen, maar dat is voor een echte PHP freak die graag met Symfony en/of Drupal werkt geen probleem. Grote klanten, mooie vila, leuke collega's en dito werk.

Kom maar op, de iPhone staat klaar voor je, kom maar op!

I wrote about the OLPC before when I wanted you to donate one. But now I am writing to the Drupal community to help ship the OLPC with Drupal on it installed by deafult. If Drupal would be on the OLPC, young users could easy write and share news, videos or photo's with each other. If you care (about Open Source, Drupal and a better world for all), please help us make this happen.

For starters, edit the wiki page on groups.drupal.org/drupal-olpc and add what you will do!

Come on, even if you dont code, you help in many wys here. Write documentation for young people, test a profiler install and dozen of other ways. Doing so will help Drupal, OLPC , yourself by feeling better but most of all, it will help us all to spread information, wellness and access to knowledge better around the world. Help now!

Be sure to read also:
wiki.laptop.org, OLPCnews, developmenseed

UPDATE: I just got a mail from teh devel list from laptop.org saying

Drupal would potentially be very useful on the School Server, which is a
much more appropriate platform. The current prototypes of the school
server are configured to run Moodle. You will have to make a case that
Drupal is a sensible counterpart to Moodle, can be integrated with it,
or should replace it.

I still think having Drupal on an OLPC is good, even if only for having people experiment with the code or use a meshed network distribution where users can post from their own laptop and synchronize to the central school server.

Over at Grupthink you can vote for the Best Open Source Project.

"Best Project" can be defined in a dozen of ways; project management (leadership, delegation, matureness of community) but also code base (quality) or even number of installs.

The top 20 (anything from linux, apache, vlc, blender 3d to php) are all very useful and worth your vote. But if you care about Drupal, you might want to vote up this CMS and make it go to the top10.