Dynamics Within Drupal: Where Developers Are Going?

As the Drupal project and the community around it keep growing, interesting dynamics develop, and are interesting to watch ...

After the Vancouver DrupalCON in February 2006, there were new entrants in the fray, I wrote about the community being in crossroads.

Today, I am writing about further consolidation within the consulting arm of the community.

Just to make it clear, I am just writing observations and opinion, and I am not exposing any information that is not already public. I am not privy to any such information, so I cannot be divulging anything that I don't have in the first place.

The consolidation seems to be in consulting shops that are founded by Drupal developers, or attract develpors to their ranks.

These include:

Lullabot

Lullabot was founded by Jeff Robbins (jjeff) and Matt Westgate. Jeff is a relative newcomer to the Drupal community but has a long track record in web development, and has proven his mettle in Drupal by many contributions. Matt Westgate is a very capable Drupal developer who is the original author of the ecommerce package and many other modules. They were joined by Ted serbinski (m3vrck), and the latest addition is Angela Byron (webchick) who was a Summer of Code student in 2005, and have moved from that to core development.

Lullabot has done several unique things of late, including Podcasts about Drupal, as well as Drupal training.

Bryght

Bryght is not a consulting house per se, but a hosting service provider, using Drupal for turnkey sites.

They already employ James Walker (walkah) and Adrian Roussow (adrian) from the core team. They recently had Steven Wittens (steven, unconed, acko) joining them, who is also a core committer.

Bryght is co-founded by Boris Mann who is the top Drupal evangelist and chief hand waver.

Advomatic

Another consulting shop that has several developers join recently is Advomatic. They have Ankur Rishi (ankur), Aaron Welch (crunchywelch) and John Handelaar. They also have Neil Drumm who is a core committer.

CivicSpace Labs

CivicSpace Labs were 'the' original Drupal shop, evolving from Hack4Dean that morphed into DeanSpace in 2004 Howard Dean campaign for US presidency. At one point they had Neil Drumm, Angela Byron, and Ankur Rishi. They also had Chris Messina (factoryjoe) and Trae McCombs (occy) on the design side.

They now have Zack Rosen, Nedjo Rogers (nedjo) and Robin Monks.

They are also the only Drupal shop that offers a separate, and successful, Drupal distribution (CivicSpace).

Kieran Lal, CivicSpace Labs CTO, has been a pillar of the community for a long time.

Others

Kjartan Mannes, one of three original committers to Drupal has been missing in action for quite some time from anything Drupal.

Karoly Negyesi (chx) is employed by NowPublic, which is a Drupal site. He is still completing university as well.

Dries Buytaert, project leader for Drupal is an unpaid advisor to NowPublic as well, and also working on his Ph.D. But where will he end up full time? One may speculate, but if one looks at other projects (e.g. Linux and Linus Torvalds, not working for Red Hat or SuSE), not aligning with a Drupal shop may be best, and may be difficult as well.

I think Dries needs to do what is best for him and for Drupal, not what me or others feel.

Time will tell on this one ...

As for Gerhard Killesreiter, a core committer as of May this year, he is still not aligned with any of the development shops, apart from contracting to some of them.

Conclusion

Where developers are seems to be as permanent as bits on blogs in cyberspace.

From what I see, the current trend is that Drupal developers are coalescing together in shops, with designers and more business savvy people.