Drupal’s founder Dried Buytaert has Jive Software in his sights as his company prepares a free Drupal distribution called “Drupal Commons.”
Drupal Commons by Acquia will integrate groups, discussion forums, blogs, wikis and events into one package.In a blog post, Buytaert says Acquia will compete generally with social business software but in particular he points out Jive Software.
Buytaert is one of Acquia’s founders. According to Buytaert, Acquia is deveoping a network of cloud-based distributions to “deliver a wide variety of electronic services intended to be useful to people developing and operating Drupal websites. An example such service is an automated upgrade/update service, an uptime and performance monitoring / reporting service, a configuration management service, etc.”
Why Buytaert points out Jive Software comes in part due to Jive’s recent attacks on Drupal. Jive recently wrote a report outlining its case for why it has a competitive advantage over Drupal.
Buytaert writes:
“Drupal Commons is also a good response to some of the FUD that Jive Software has been spreading about Open Source software, and Drupal in particular. The screenshot below, taken from a Jive Software whitepaper, shows how they position themselves against Drupal, and how they justify charging million dollar license fees to their customers. I don’t know about you, but we’d love to show how Drupal can run circles around Jive SBS for a lot less money.”
Drupal offers modules that can do what a social software provides.But the modules have to be integrated. Drupal Commons will be a pre-packaged service. Buytaert concludes:
“Without Drupal distributions, we won’t be able to successfully compete with commercial vendors. Drupal distributions have great potential, but we have to do them right, and we have to figure out how to make them sustainable.”
