In the year 2000, Dries Buytaert created Drupal, a freely licensed and open source tool to manage websites, as a bulletin board for his college dorm. Since Dries released the software and a community of thousands of volunteer developers have added and improved modules, Drupal has grown immensely popular.

Belgian developer Dries Buytaert is on the verge of putting open source CMS (content management system) Drupal officially into business.

Drupal’s founder, Dries Buytaert tells all about the Drupal project: its history, where it is today and where it is going.

In this interview we talk with Dries. In specific, we talk about: Building specialized commercial support for open source technology, Making cloud computing more viable for widespread use, The relationship between Drupal and Linux distros, and Lowering the barriers to the deployment of Drupal, Integrating multiple functionalities and components into one solution.

Dries Buytaert started down his path to fame when he coded up a private message board for his college dormitory. Nine years later, that modest bulletin board software package has grown into Drupal, one of the most popular open-source content publishing systems on the web with thousands of active contributors.

The annual DrupalCon conference is coming up, April 19th to 21st at San Francisco's Moscone Center. Drupal, of course, is the increasingly popular open source content management system founded by Dries Buytaert, and OStatic itself runs on the platform.

Drupal is a modular content management system. It allows a user or group of users to construct Web sites, blogs, or forums by providing the framework for users with little or no PHP or database experience. It grows more popular with each new release because it becomes easier to use each new release. Drupal 6.0 (and 6.1) were recently released after a year of development.

While attending DrupalCon San Francisco 2010 last week, I got a chance to catch up with Dries Buytaert, founder and project lead of Drupal to get some insight beyond the bits and bytes. We talked about the open source way and some of the things he's learned over the past 10 years.

Drupal, the popular open source Web content management system, will sacrifice speed for scalability in the upcoming Drupal 7 upgrade, the founder of the project said on Monday afternoon.