Dries Buytaert (born 19 November 1978)Curriculum Vitae
is a Belgian

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Op ...

programmer A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software. A programmer is someone who writes/creates ...

. He is the founder and lead developer of the

Drupal Drupal () is a free and open-source web content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal provides an open-source back-end framework for at least 14% of the top 10,000 websites worldwide ...

content management system. He also serves as the CTO of

Acquia Acquia is a software-as-a-service company co-founded by Dries Buytaert and Jay Batson to provide enterprise products, services, and technical support for the open-source web content management platform Drupal. Overview The company is venture ca ...

Career

Buytaert was born in

Wilrijk Wilrijk (; former, original spelling: ''Wilrijck'') is a district of the municipality and city of Antwerp in the Belgian province of Antwerp. Wilrijk had been a separate municipality before January 1, 1983; the enlarged municipality of Antwerp was ...

Antwerp Antwerp (; nl, Antwerpen ; french: Anvers ; es, Amberes) is the largest city in Belgium by area at and the capital of Antwerp Province in the Flemish Region. With a population of 520,504,

Belgium Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to th ...

. He defended his PhD dissertation in

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

on 27 January 2008, at

Ghent University Ghent University ( nl, Universiteit Gent, abbreviated as UGent) is a public research university located in Ghent, Belgium. Established before the state of Belgium itself, the university was founded by the Dutch King William I in 1817, when the ...

in Belgium. From 1999 to 2000 he was the maintainer of the ''

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

WLAN A wireless LAN (WLAN) is a wireless computer network that links two or more devices using wireless communication to form a local area network (LAN) within a limited area such as a home, school, computer laboratory, campus, or office buildin ...

FAQ''. On 1 December 2007, Dries announced, together with co-founder Jay Batson, the launch of a start-up called

. Acquia is a commercial open-source software company providing products, services, and technical support for Drupal. Acquia tries to be to Drupal what

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide. Red Hat has become ass ...

has been to

. In 2009, Acquia helped re-launch Whitehouse.gov on Drupal. On 31 March 2008, Dries launched Mollom, a service dedicated to stopping website spam: "Mollom's purpose is to dramatically reduce the effort of keeping your site clean and the quality of your content high. Currently, Mollom is a spam-killing one-two punch combination of a state-of-the-art spam filter and CAPTCHA server." Over 59,000 websites are protected by the Mollom service, including all of

Netlog Netlog (formerly known as Facebox and Bingbox) was a Belgian social networking service targeted at the global youth demographic. On Netlog, members could create their own web page, meet new people, chat, play games, share videos and post blogs. T ...

's messages. Mollom support ended 2 April 2018. In 2008, Buytaert was elected "Young Entrepreneurs of Tech" by

BusinessWeek ''Bloomberg Businessweek'', previously known as ''BusinessWeek'', is an American weekly business magazine published fifty times a year. Since 2009, the magazine is owned by New York City-based Bloomberg L.P. The magazine debuted in New York City ...

. He was also named to the

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

Technology Review ''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and editorially independent of the university. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "The" in ...

TR35 The Innovators Under 35 is a peer-reviewed annual award and listicle published by ''MIT Technology Review'' magazine, naming the world's top 35 innovators under the age of 35. at ''Technology Review'' with lists of winners at technologyreview.com ...

as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.

Dismissal of Larry Garfield

In March of 2017, Buytaert fired Drupal developer Larry Garfield and disinvited him from DrupalCon, shortly after forum posts came to light that outed Garfield as a participant in the

Gorean subculture Gorean subculture is a fandom based on the philosophy espoused in John Norman's long-running sword and planet novel series '' Chronicles of Counter-Earth''. Background Gorean subculture developed independently of Norman's involvement, particul ...

. In a March 22 blog post, Garfield accused Buytaert of tolerating

doxing Doxing or doxxing is the act of publicly providing personally identifiable information about an individual or organization, usually via the internet. Historically, the term has been used interchangeably to refer to both the aggregation of this i ...

and wrote that Drupal's Community Working Group had not found any Code of Conduct violations in his history. Buytaert made a post the next day which defended the firing as necessary for fostering an inclusive community. He also wrote that his precise reasoning was confidential and that he "did not make the decision based on the information or beliefs conveyed in Larry's blog post." Several commentators disputed this characterization citing Buytaert's deleted sentence "further participation in a leadership role implies our community is complicit with and/or endorses these views, which we do not." 85 Drupal developers posted an open letter criticizing Buytaert for his handling of the situation.

Personal life

Buytaert lives in Boston.

References

External links

Personal websiteAcquiaMollom

Interviews

An In-Depth Interview With Dries
Drupal Watchdog interview (February 2011)
Drupal founder, Dries Buytaert Interview
CMS Critic interview (January 2009)
Video interview
with Dries Buytaert by Noel Hidalgo in Antwerp, Belgium (26 July 2007)

Talks

DrupalCon Los Angeles 2015: Driesnote Keynote
- Dries' talk at DrupalCon 2015 in Los Angeles, United States (May 2015)
The State of Drupal
- Dries' talk at

FOSDEM Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized European event centered on free and open-source software development. It is aimed at developers and anyone interested in the free and ...

2007 in Brussels, Belgium (February 2007)
Video of talk
delivered by Dries Buytaert titled the ''State of Drupal'' from OSCMS conference on Yahoo campus in Sunnyvale, California (late March 2007)
The State of Drupal
- Dries' State of Drupal talk at Drupalcon 2007 in Barcelona, Spain (September 2007) {{DEFAULTSORT:Buytaert, Dries Free software programmers Web developers Belgian computer programmers 1978 births Living people People from Wilrijk Scientists from Antwerp Drupal