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A startup company will release the first commercially supported distribution of Drupal, an increasingly popular open-source Web site builder/content management system, in the second half of this year. Start-up firm Acquia, led by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert, will release a commercial version, code-named Carbon, that adds 30 top Drupal modules, a packaged installer, assorted documentation and site-building guidelines to the free Drupal 6.x core.

The entire package of Carbon will undergo additional testing to ensure enterprise grade stability. In addition, Acquia will offer full technical support for its Drupal distribution. Currently, open source Drupal users rely on community resources such as mailing lists and discussion forums for support. Buytaert noted that Acquia will also offer Network Services as hosted offerings on Acquia's infrastructure to provide deployment and monitoring capabilities for Drupal sites.

"Acquia is not going to fork or close source Drupal," Buytaert said. Acquia will "listen to and work with the community to advance Drupal." The Drupal Association will continue to operate the Drupal.org domain; Buytaert will continue to own the Drupal trademark; and the Drupal community will continue to set the technical direction of the Drupal project, Buytaert added.

Drupal is currently available under a GPL version 2 open source license. Under Acquia, Buytaert said, licensing will not change and that the commercially supported version of Drupal will also be GPLv2 licensed. He also noted that from a development point of view as much as possible would be done in the open.

By keeping the project open source, Bryan House, director of product marketing, says the company can offer a reliable, robust platform without the financial burdens of closed software. "I think the opportunity is we can provide support and reliability and testing that an enterprise demands of software, but do it in a way where we don't burden them with expensive licensing costs," he says.

Jay Batson, who was the founding CEO of open source VOIP software company Pingtel, is also part of Acquia's executive team. Acquia is getting USD 7 million in funding to start from a number of backers, including North Bridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

Acquia’s figures show that Drupal has been downloaded two million times and that the Drupal.org community has more than 240,000 members. Companies using it to build websites including Forbes and The Onion.