Dries Buytaert's website

Marc Andreessen famously said that software is eating the world. While I certainly agree with Marc that software companies are redefining our economies, I believe that much of that technological shift is being driven by data. So is the value of a business in the data or is it in the software? I believe the value is increasingly more in the data and not the software. Let's investigate why.

Today the Drupal Association announced a new program: the Drupal 8 Accelerate Fund. Drupal 8 Accelerate Fund is a $125,000 USD fund to help solve critical issues and accelerate the release of Drupal 8.

The concept of official initiatives came out of lessons learned from the Drupal 7 development.

Drupal 8 is the first time we introduced the concept of formal initiatives and initiative leads. Over the course of these Drupal 8 initiatives we learned a lot and people are floating several ideas to increase the initiatives' success and provide Drupal initiative leads with more support.

After 10 years of development, the W3C has promoted HTML5 to "Recommendation" yesterday: http://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/4167. W3C's "Recommendation" status is the highest level of maturation, effectively making the markup language a formal standard.

Almost 20% of the world's websites have adopted HTML5, so for many, HTML5 is nothing new.

My company Acquia was honored this week by BelCham, the Belgian-American Chamber of Commerce, as the "Company of the Year". I'm proud of this honor, which speaks to the great work that our team of more than 500 Acquians from around the globe do for our customers everyday.

Today we announced Drupal 8 beta 1! This key milestone is the work of over 2,300 people who have contributed more than 11,500 committed patches to 15 alpha releases, and especially the 234 contributors who fixed 178 "beta blocker" issues. A massive thank-you to everyone who helped get Drupal 8 beta 1 done.

I spent the last week in Japan. The goal was two-fold: meet with the Drupal community to understand how we can grow Drupal in Japan, and evaluate the business opportunity to incorporate an Acquia subsidiary in Japan (we already offer Acquia Cloud in Japan using Amazon's Tokyo data center).

Last weekend I had the opportunity to visit the Great Wall of China, the world's longest wall at 8,850 kilometers (5,500 miles). The Great Wall runs mostly through the mountains to take advantage of natural obstacles. As a result, it was quite the hike to get there but once on the Great Wall, the scenery was beyond sensational.

After spending the summer in Boston, I'm ready to fly across the world ... literally, as I'm leaving on a two week trip to China and Japan later this week. I'm very excited about it as I've never had the opportunity to see either of these countries.

The notion that people contributing to Open Source don't get paid is false. Contributors to Open Source are compensated for their labor; not always with financial capital (i.e. a paycheck) but certainly with social capital. Social capital is a rather vague and intangible concept so let me give some examples. If you know someone at a company where you are applying for a job and this connection helps you get that job, you have used social capital.