I think that Drupal as a community is now at a crossroads.
Having been at the Drupal Conference in Vancouver from February 7th to 9th, I was overwhelmed by what was happening. There are too many people in attendance, and talking about all sorts of things. Two consulting companies had a whole contingent each in attendance. These are Trellon and CivicActions.
So Far So Good
So far, Drupal's core has been contributed to by volunteers, with just Dries Buytaert and Steven Wittens as committers of patches to core. There is no influence from large shops or corporations.
The open source process has worked for Drupal, and made it into the capable platform that we all know today.
This platform is now picking up speed with commercial ventures, be they startups, corporations, or web development shops, and that introduces its own set of problems ...
Forking And Corporate Influence
Zack Rosen of Civic Space Labs has realized that Drupal risks being forked either as a cost to a project for certain features, or by larger corporations. He also blogged on how Drupal core is essential and mainly manned by volunteers. There is a risk of corporations trying to steer Drupal to their own agendas, and hence organized on short notice a session at the conference.
Three weeks later, Ken Rickard posted to the development list that he recommended to his employer that they have to be an active community member to influence Drupal's direction.
So, this is a real concern: large corporations should not be able to steer Drupal into their own direction, no matter how benevolent they seem to be. It is the community that drives it and it should remain so. My personal message to the large shops: be good community members and play fair ...
The Big Guys And The Little Guys
There is also a divide that I can see: the individual consultant/small shop vs. the larger shops. It all started with this thread in the Drupal consulting mailing list, by Greg Heller, project manager at CivicAction, about a conference call for consulting shops.
It seems that there was a private email exchange between Jason Flatt and Greg. Jason felt that he was brushed off as "not the target audience of this conference call" because he is an independant who merely "dabbled in Drupal".
Gerhard Killesreiter, a long time Drupal expert and prolific contributor, responded in his usual "tell it as it is", being German.
Growing Pains
I am not a pessimist, and see all this as positive, being a time of flux caused by growing pains. Drupal has been "discovered" by the rest of the world, and there is no putting back the genie in the bottle. The community has to evolve to cope with this.
Let the comments begin ...
Comments
greggles (not verified)
Crossroads indeed
Mon, 2006/02/27 - 18:19I agree about the crossroads - though I would characterize it more as growing pains. I don't see "crossroads" where multiple options present themselves - I mostly see some struggles that the community is growing through.
A formal fork doesn't seem likely to me. I think forks happen mostly when there is a desire by someone to take a project in a new direction and they don't have the ability to go in that direction themselves. The Drupal module system and the support for "distributions" limits that need to take control. I think Zack's concern was more about accidental forking - where someone does a project with Drupal, makes a change to get the job done, but does the change in a quick/hackish way and not either as something that can be patched on core or added as a module. Accidental forks don't seem like they create a problem except for the possibility that features/bugfixes that should get contributed don't get back in. Like I said, not a big problem.
Firms vs. Consultants - I sincerely hope that was just a mistake on Gregory's part and not a representation of the popular view on the subject.
There are a couple of things that I think Drupal could learn from the Mozilla Project:
1. Create a Drupal Foundation to accept donations and to employ "visionary" types so those visionaries can evangelize, set long term goals, and spend some time coding and supporting the core
2. Create a Drupal Company - this step is already done, but I think we will see consolidation among some of the shops and the consultants and see a few companies become more dominant - that's not a bad thing as long as they are hiring people to work on core (which they are) and the contribute back to core (which I believe they are)
3. Realize it's not terrible to have various developers and project supporters hired by various companies - Mozilla has or had employees at Novell, RedHat, IBM, Google, Apple, Linspire/Disruptive Innovations, and many other smaller companies. This hasn't hurt the Mozilla project, but has certainly helped. Google funded a big usability study about tabs that probably wouldn't have happened without their support. That's great! I believe the same process has occurred with Linux kernel (though I am less familiar with it).
That's my take on the subject. I appreciate your post here on it as well.
greggles (Knaddison, not Heller)