Using Drupal has suddenly become much easier. My company, Acquia, has just released into (private) Beta Drupal Gardens. We've been working on Drupal Gardens for over a year, teaming our expert Drupalers with our crack infrastructure / hosting experts, to provide Drupal 7 as a hosted service. We've included tons of usability improvements, and contributed the vast majority of them back to the open source project.

Drupal Gardens is truly amazing. It'll rock your socks off if you're a Drupaler, and even if you're not, it'll make building extremely powerful websites drop-dead simple.

Watch the screencast below, and come sign up for a Private Beta invitation.

Today in the Boston Globe there's an article in the business section about Acquia. It's gratifying to see our company start to get visibility outside the close-knit Drupal community. I just wanted to take a moment to expand on it a bit.

Looks like Marten Mickos, one-time CEO of MySQL is leaving Sun. Matt Asay talked to Mickos, and had a sense that they key motivating factor was "(Mickos') frustration at Sun's bureaucracy."

I have no doubt this was a strong contributing factor. I've had my own experiences with Sun over the years, and while I love the technology they produce (which apparently enough other people like to keep them a big company), the business side of Sun can be maddening. Getting something done with Sun is typically a big exercise in patience.

But in contrast to Matt, I don't think the bureaucracy was really it. Though I only know Marten through very casual, infrequent conversations, two things show up for me:

Ahhhh.... In the cycling world, when you catch up to a group riding ahead of you, and pass them with ease, you feel sooooo happy about the the fact that you're strong enough to pass them. (Am I competitive? Nah... ;-)

The same thing happens in tech, too. The latest example? When closed source vendors start to get defensive about open source alternatives, you know the open source is starting to affect their business, and the open source project is pulling up to - and passing - the closed-source products.

I just took 30+ minutes to watch Kathy Sierra speaking at a WordCamp SF event. It's worth listening to.

Lots of video conversations. Jay gets goofy occasionally. Jeff runs a timer to keep us (me) from going down too many rabbit holes. Dries wears headphones to keep from driving Karlijn nuts.