Drupal Commons targets the enterprise

Acquia yesterday released Drupal Commons 1.0, an open source social networking system aimed at enterprises.

Writing at the company's blog, Jay Batson acknowledged that Drupal Commons is aimed squarely at proprietary solutions that are giving social software a bad name in the enterprise space:

Enterprises were calling us because of Drupal’s reputation for freedom and flexibility; but they were making the proprietary software choice - with all its downside - because there wasn’t a fully-functional, off-the-shelf Drupal solution for social business use.

That era comes to an end today

As noted earlier today, enterprises are focused on open source, but they're looking at it as something they can take from, like they cut pay and raise hours for employees, not something requiring give-and-take.

This attitude is especially prevalent in the government space, and in particular the security space. In writing about one man's battle to get good software into the CIA, and his decision to finally just make it open source, DangerRoom's Noah Schachtman offers some criticism of yours truly. But he misses my larger point.

(Thanks for spelling my name right. Although with the raking David Blankenhorn (no relation) got last night I wonder if it's really a favor.)

What's happening in the case of Eureka Streams and the Open Information Security Framework is the same thing Batson complains of in his post, and it's an important point that deserves repeating.

Enterprises want solutions handed to them on a platter, but they also want to control the resulting projects without contributing. The greater your focus on security (and security is an obsession far beyond government) the more common this attitude is.

This is the attitude that needs to change. Even when security people deploy open source, they're looking to re-invent the wheel and control the resulting project, contributing nothing to people they can't control. This attitude tosses away many open source advantages.

As Drupal Commons works its way into enterprises, Acquia gets a chance to teach this important lesson. Open source does make software a shared experience. That's a feature, not a bug.

And it's an important one.