There's about as many ways to do commercially-supported open source as there are ways to do open source, period. I sat down at the Web 2.0 Expo to talk to Jeff Whatcott, VP of Marketing for Acquia, about how their distribution of Drupal works in that vein.

Drupal is easily one of the most popular site-framework tools out there, not just because it's open source and liberally licensed, but because it covers such a staggering amount of territory: blogging, content management, community development, and a metric ton of other functionality. Drupal grew up with Web 2.0 and evolved with it, and a lot of that evolution's success is due to its Drupal being both an open source project and an open source contribution destination.

What's been missing, thus far, is someone offering support and services for Drupal users in as professional a context as, say, Red Hat's support for Linux. Hence Aquia: "We want to introduce the power of Drupal to people who haven't been able to figure it out or found it to be a little scary 'cos of the open source angle -- and make life easier for people currently using it," as Jeff put it.

Their first and most important offering is a commercially-supported edition of Drupal. "We package it, test it, do additional security reviews of it" -- something well worth special mention -- "and deliver it. The software itself is free, but we do charge for a subscription to the Acquia Network. That gives you access to tech support, network services -- which includes things like spam blocking, automatic updates, uptime monitoring, and system tracking. It doesn't matter where your copy of Drupal is running, either. The remote monitoring features are in our own distro of Drupal, built out of modules we've made; you can go and see all of your Drupal instances on a single maintenance dashboard."

Acquia's services are currently being used to manage a few fairly major Drupal sites -- Flex.org, for example, Adobe's Flex site, is an Acquia Drupal instance. They also provide support for themes that are packaged with the distro -- they don't actually do theme design themselves, but anything in the distro you can buy support for immediately.

Our talk about how Acquia does their thing led into a discussion of what Jeff called "organic vs. inorganic" open source. The former would be something like Linux or Drupal, which starts off as open source and later finds a commercial outlet or commercial support. Jeff compared Acquia's Drupal to something like CentOS: you don't have to pay to get access to it if you just want to get your hands on it. The latter would be projects that start off as closed-source and are later opened up,but not always entirely and sometimes with less-than-ideal licensing schemes.

"When you go open source," Jeff said, "the power of the business model is in encouraging broad participation and taking away the friction that prevents people from being creative with your code. If you make it too complicated and erect all these little tollbooths, the net effect of that is that fewer people make code, the community is smaller and less productive. That's costly in the long term. But if you have a minimalist strategy, with as few tollbooths as possible, you'll have a better balance."

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