Will Freedom Stop at Drupal Code; and a Voice for the Disunited

Dries Buytaert joining his own Drupal-related start-up is the best thing that could happen for Drupal on his graduation. Joining an existing Drupal shop would have been good – Agaric would have taken him ;-) – but not as good as leaving all the great Drupal shops doing what they do and bringing fresh energy and investment to Drupal.

But I had to take the opportunity to bring up two ongoing concerns Agaric has with Drupal: the advancing of public tools and knowledge for deploying and configuring Drupal sites (yes, we need help!) and even more importantly helping the individuals, the dispersed, the disorganized to fund their Drupal needs just like major private parties and to some extent Drupal shops with a bunch of mid-size clients are able to do.

So here's my comment– rude maybe but on-topic I think. And of course it's not on Dries to do either of these things, I'm mostly looking for people who want to do the latter with PWGD, and it's quite up to shops like Agaric to coordinate with other small Drupal shops to meet our needs for developing and deploying Drupal– or to buy Acquia's solutions whether they're free software or not.

Congratulations, and this is fantastic, and I echo everything good everyone said! This will hugely benefit Drupal, especially with adoption by larger organizations. More than anything, more people paid largely for general core work (not least of all yourself!) and fill-in-the-gaps as you wrote may be more than huge, it may be transformational for Drupal.

Just two points (entirely separate from one another) outside of the glowing praise:

1. Phrasing in this announcement worries me that while Drupal code will always be open source free software, everything else Acquia does may be non-free (as in freedom) or at any rate secret. I urge Acquia to be as open with producing Drupal-enhancing development, deployment, and other tools as it possibly can.

2. As mentioned, Acquia will be a huge part of meeting the unmet big needs of big players, to the benefit of all current and potential Drupal users. I remain convinced that a common space for aggregating the needs of smaller organizations and businesses (pledge X amount for Y functionality) could similarly put Drupal on a new level of usefulness and use. This should be under nonprofit auspices if not Drupal.org and I'd love to talk to anyone about that anytime.

Actually I think Acquia's stated focus on distributions of Drupal (presumably way better installation profiles, and the critical first step of automatic packaging is already started by hunmonk and dww's work on Project module) goes a long way toward addressing both my comments: this will realize the potential of Drupal distributions now hinted at with installation profiles, and this easy way of "getting the Drupal you want" is just what the little guys need. But just saying congratulations is boring ;-)