The Crossing Paths Of Drupal And WordPress

Yes I know, Drupal is being talked about on a WordPress centric site. However, I find a number of things about Drupal to be interesting such as its progress, its founder, and its newly created commercial entity Acquia. There are so many things that Drupal and Acquia are doing that make me think of WordPress and Automattic not to mention what the founders of each are doing.

David Berlind of InformationWeek.com published a great article mentioning the differences and the similarities between both the founders of each platform as well as the commercial entities surrounding them.

As I came to learn in the interview, it’s as though Buytaert and Mullenweg were separated at birth. They were born only 6 years apart (The older of the two — Buytaert — was born in 1978 when I was a senior in high school). Both went on to create wildly successful PHP-based content management systems (Mullenweg did WordPress, Buytaert did Drupal). Both men open sourced those content management systems. And today, both are the founders of VC-funded commercial enterprises (Mullenweg’s Automattic and Buytaert’s Acquia) looking to capitalize on their founders’ art and fame.

If you’re interested in these similarities/differences like me, I encourage you to take a listen to the (mp3 file) half hour interview David produced with the founder of Drupal where they discuss Drupals beginnings, the question of whether or not Acquia plans on offering Drupal as a service and the overall future of Drupal. There are some WordPress/Automattic tidbits in the interview as well.