Dries Buytaert

Dries Buytaert (born 19 November 1978 in Wilrijk, Antwerp, Belgium) is an open-source software programmer notable as founder and lead developer of the Drupal CMS.

Buytaert defended his PhD dissertation in Computer Science on 27 January 2008 at Ghent University in Belgium.

From 1999-2000 he was the maintainer of the Linux-WLAN FAQ.

It was during this time that he founded the concept of Drupal. At first, Dries maintained a small news site and a web board, but it developed to attract more audience.

On 1 December 2007, Dries announced, together with co-founder Jay Batson the launch of a start-up called Acquia. Acquia is a commercial open-source software company providing products, services, and technical support for Drupal. Acquia wants to be to Drupal what Red Hat has been to Linux. 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's messages.

In 2008, Buytaert was elected "Young Entrepreneurs of Tech" by BusinessWeek. He was also named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.

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