"Dries is selling out!", all follow the New Leader


Open Source. Simple in principle yet can become very complex. For example Open Source is build by volunteers who do it for many reasons but for most "ego" is one of the important reasons. And since the value that created is so high, "money" is often another reason to use (and contribute) to open source. Ego, Money and Open Source, a match made in a very warm place.

Acquia is one of the companies that is acting within the triangle money, ego and Open Source / community. Not that Dries has a big ego, but he is a person / icon in the Drupal community and hence people look at him and his "ego". And the moment you are in this triangle -despite the fact that you have been working "for free" for 7 years in such a community- people will try to seek ugly things.

Take for example this wordpress blog entry. It is full of nonsense and maybe I should turn my head and look the other way and not comment on it per point since the complete point is nonsense, but then again, if people keep writing nonsense without being put straight, other people might actually hear the echo of "nonsense" as "sense".

Let me start commenting on some of the nonsense:

Acquia then announced Certifications and Partner Program. But now the most recent job postings show they are getting into Professional Services. This clearly shows that Dries and Acquia has started to find any possible avenue to monetize the brand Drupal. And as they add more offerings, the community feels more and more cheated!

Great detective work, and yes, the WP blogger is speaking on behalf of "the community" and (s)he feels cheated on. I would say, If you feel cheated on, talk to your partner.First, if there is a brand "Drupal" then I can not see why monetizing it would be bad. I know lots and lots of companies that make money with Drupal without ever giving anything back, code wise or money wise. They are free to do so, but the moment ego Dries does it, it is a problem. Once again, talk to your partner if you feel cheated on but do not talk for the community from your anonymous WP blog

Why does the community continue to improve and contribute code back when Acquia having bigger marketing budgets and despite being relatively new is being projected as the goto Drupal shop.

Because Acquia is -like al OSS shops- the shoulders of the community. And it is in the interest of Acquia to make this community better, faster and bigger so Acquia will raise as well. Acquia stands on the shoulders of giants, but is not pissing down its neck.

Where would Acquia have been had there been no Dries?

No Dries in Acquia? Then it would be a company (like it is now). No Dries in Drupal, then maybe within another OSS project. Where would Acqia be if the parents of Dries never met? I can not see what rhetorical questions like these ad anything to the discussion. And think about this for one minute: what if Dries decided NOT to work full time proffsional on Drupal but on another proprietary JAVA CMS?

Will Acquia release all the code they are building to the community? Can there be another “Carbon” like product if someone else puts in $10mm investment and compete with Acquia?

Yes and yes. Mind you, Acquia sells services, not code. The "Give away the recipe, open up a restaurant" model. Up to now, Dries made very clear that all code that is distributed (!) is under the GPLicense, copyrighted by Acquia or not, and they will distribute it under the GPL, see also the excellent license FAQ. I would say, raise 10M and compete with Acquia, you are free to do so.

Dries owns the “Drupal” trademark and also is a key stakeholder in Acquia. Will this not create a conflict in community who now see Acquia as a threat on any work they do?

The trademark "Drupal" is owned by Dries and protected by th Drupal Association. The upcoming policy for trademark policy will be the same for Acquia as it will be for SmallDrupalShop.

There are many Drupal Local User Groups where lot of innovation is planned, architected as well as later released back. Will this slow down? Why has there been no stable Drupal 6 upgrades of many good Drupal 5 contributed modules even months after Drupal 6 release? Has the community lost interest?

Once again, totally irrelevant for the Dries-is-in-Acquia-and-now-the-sky-falls-on-our-head discussion. CCK, Views2 and the D6 discussion have nothing todo with this. You know about CCK right?

Joomla was forked from Mambo. Will we see a new leader in Drupal who truely has interest in product and not get swayed away with commercial interests?

If Dries would piss down the neck of the Drupal Community this will happen, Darwin! And you are free to become The Leader With True Interest in the Product, please do so all the lemmings will follow you Great Leader. Since Dries is /clearly/ selling out and not working many many hours per week for "nothing" on Drupal (code, association and community)

Dries now does not seem to have time for Drupal.

Yes, only 21 status updates the last 24 hours despite Drupal Association meetings, attending a full DrupalCon, running his company and talking to dozen of people. Clearly no time for Drupal.

Please, stop trying pissing down on others with your zipper still up, it smells bad and makes you look funny.

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I love the smell of irony

This is good stuff for closing a week of hard work, thanks. Mr. Banana Smoothie even forgot to add one thing to his ramblings: Dries also holds a position in the very same Drupal Association that looks over the trademark: he's the *gasp* President! I'm looking forward to reading the follow-up story!

confused

Why are you even bothering to comment on an anonymous fear mongering FUD post on an attack blog setup purposely on a WordPress site to spread disinformation?

It's strange that some

It's strange that some people accept the fact that many companies profit from open source but cannot stand that the project lead does the same. Dries has to earn a living too and the Drupal project benefits more from his work, when he works on Drupal and not no something completely different.
Btw. your link to Dries blog does not work. It points to butaert.net.

Just a troll

I'm surprised that anyone would even take the time to respond to this guy. There's no information, insight or anything else in his post.

not complex

There's nothing complex about it.

Free software does not mean “gratis”; it means that users are free to run the program, study the source code, change it, and redistribute it either with or without changes, either gratis or for a fee. (Richard Stallman, 2004)

My only wish would be more developers used FOSS development environments. Then everyone would benefit from free software, and it would all be as good as Drupal, or Apache, Firefox, Open Office, Eclipse, BSD, Ruby, Python, PHP, MySQL, VNC, Inkscape.... you get the idea.

Linux is so close, and could be so much more

Predictable

This is the first time I've read the blog you referenced. As far as I can tell, the post is the first entry and at this time only post. The post in itself appears to me to be nothing more than a troll. However, I think your post here as well as many of the comments at the referenced blog shows that most of the Drupal community is indeed behind Dries.

Within hours after Dries announced his involvement with Acquia I wrote a post on my reaction to the news.

Does anyone else see the irony in Drupal's founder not beginning his first Drupal startup until seven years after releasing Drupal publicly? Think of all the developers, IT leaders, and companies that have prospered over the years from Drupal. In all that time, Dries has been very careful to not benefit more than others in the Drupal community. All in all, I think Dries has shown the highest respect for open source as well as loyalty to the Drupal community

I also wrote in that same post...

I think there will be a some people looking for, and maybe hoping for, a story unfolding where conflict between Drupal's founder (now seeking commercial gain) and the Drupal open source community causes heartburn. However, I think the real story will be that there likely will be no story to tell.

Among the open source and propriety communities there seems to be some extremists on both sides that wants to see the other side fail. These same people get nervous when success stories develop that shows both business models can coexist with each other. People such as these seem to be too narrow minded to acknowldge the good that can come out of both communities. These people are predictable and I feel sad for them on having such a negative view on life. I am however, happy to have read your post.

Two contradictory viewpoints indeed

Both posts are showing different viewpoints and both has some merit. Only time will reflect which of this holds up. One option may be to have Drupal Trademark released to Drupal Association, get registration under 501(c)(3) in US. Dries may find it difficult in future to see that he does not do any bias towards Acquia at the stake of Drupal. Him being trademark owner of Drupal and Permanent Member of Drupal Association certainly has to play a very fine line legally else he can get in lot of trouble.

Humans are known to do strange things where there is ton of $$$ at stake. Clearly Dries has shown leadership all along but who knows about future. If Dries and changes his mind, who would have time and energy to put a lawsuit in Belgium?

On the positive side, Dries is a very smart leader. He has been contributing code regularly has managed to provide leadership to take Drupal to new levels. He regularly takes feedback from the community on how Drupal should evolve. His State of Drupal presentations are just superb. He certainly has very high respect as of yet.

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