Every second of free time I was obsessively working on Drupal. It’s what I would do at night, on the weekends, basically every moment that I had. SEE: Best open source innovations of the decade (free TechRepublic PDF)įor the first seven years or so, it was a hobby project. So I’ve been working on Drupal for 20 years. And ever since, actually, I’ve been working on Drupal. And that’s the day that Drupal was born, and that was on January 15th, 20 years ago. Dries Buytaert in 2002, coding probablyĪnd so eventually I decided to make the software behind my site available as open source, and I spent maybe 30 seconds thinking about a name, came up with Drupal, literally copied the GPL license file from my Linux kernel into my website, and created a tarball, or a zip file, if you will, and uploaded it to my site expecting maybe 10 people to use my software. So slowly, but certainly, my website,, which was now on the public web, started to attract people interested in the future of the web because I was experimenting with all of these things. I would lurk and see what people were doing and I would add all of these capabilities to my little site. It was actually called public diaries, and added things like RSS at a time when RSS was kind of being invented. And this was before blogging was called blogging. I moved it to, that was the name of the website at the time, and the internal message board actually started to evolve into more of an experimental platform, so I started adding new capabilities like blogging. So I figured I would move my intranet application to the public web, and so obviously had to register a domain name for it. It’s how we’d stay in touch and share things, interesting links that we find on the internet, and I felt it was like a shame to shut it down as I moved out. It wasn’t called Drupal at the time, but when I finished college and I moved out of the dorm, this little website was actually a lot of fun. And I’m like, “Let’s use PHP and MySQL to build a intranet application/message board,” and that’s really how Drupal got started. And at the time, I wanted to build this application myself as a learning experience for how to build websites, and PHP and MySQL at the time were sort of the new kids on the block, were like new inventions. And for the purposes of my dorm, I wanted to build a website, an intranet really, so I could exchange messages with some of the other people living in the dorm. And as a student, I was living in a dorm. I was studying computer science in Belgium, where I was living at the time. Well, I started Drupal when I was actually a student. What’s changed a lot?ĭries Buytaert: Yeah. Before we talk about some of the lessons you’ve learned in those last two decades, give me a little bit of a maybe timeline of Drupal’s evolution over the 20 years, and maybe even just a little bit about your personal journey too. You can listen to the podcast player embedded in this article, watch a video above, or read a transcript of the interview below, edited for readability.ĭrupal to Acquia: From personal project to open source business Dries Buytaert, CTO & Founder, Acquiaīill Detwiler: And it’s exciting, not just for me to have you on the show, but also because it’s the 20th anniversary, just a few days ago actually, in January, Drupal turned 20. The following is a transcript of the interview, edited for readability. In this episode of Dynamic Developer, I talk with Dries about this and other lessons he’s learned during his 20 years as an open source leader and advocate. Dries Buytaert, the creator of Drupal and the co-founder and CTO of Acquia. Many in the open source community shun all things commercial, but they shouldn’t, says Dr.
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