Dries Buytaert

Bert Boerland predicts: Within 3 years the acronym "CMS" won't mean "Content Management System" anymore but will be redefined to "Community Management System".

Markets are more likely to fragment than to consolidate so I think both will co-exist and inevitably overlap. That said, I agree with the notion that community software will continue to emerge and that content isn't king. And to contribute to the disorderly jumble that is the CMS acronym, may I suggest a third term: Collaboration Management System. It might be a better match.

Especially the introduction of SharePoint 2007 might have significant impact on this particular market. SharePoint 2007 adds features like forums, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, news aggregation, surveys, issue tracking ... but also install profiles and custom content types. Clearly, Microsoft decided to play catch up. And rumor has it that the improved integration with Microsoft Office and Microsoft Outlook is jaw-dropping.

Drupal's document management functionality and integration with tools like Microsoft Office and OpenOffice is severely lacking. As it stands, Drupal is not a good SharePoint alternative, yet there is quite a bit of overlap in terms of functionality. It sure makes for an interesting situation.

I wonder what impact the introduction of SharePoint 2007 will have. What was once an important Drupal differentiator (i.e. bundling a wide variety of functionality into a single platform) will finally become commodity in 2007. Instead, seamless integration with other applications might become essential to compete? Interesting times!

Taken from this press release at News Yahoo!:

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said on Monday his for-profit company, Wikia Inc., is ready to give away -- for free -- all the software, computing, storage and network access that website builders need to create community collaboration sites.

The press release mentions that Wikia considers including support for Drupal. I have since talked briefly to Jimmy Wales, and they would like to reach out to the Drupal community and Drupal experts to help figure out how they can make that happen ...

As web content management systems and blogging tools become commodity, mass hosting and deployment services (i.e. installation, configuration, upgrading, patching, cloning, import and export, backup and restore, customization, compliance tracking, etc) will become increasingly important.

Smart as we are, we already started taking Drupal into that direction, and much of that will be rolled out with Drupal 5. ;-) There is a tremendous amount of experience to be gained, but also a significant amount of Drupal work left to be done. I'm looking forward to help work on this more and I hope other people do too. Hot stuff!

Eben Moglen (Professor of Law and General Counsel for the Free Software Foundation) delivered an incredibly interesting keynote at the Plone conference.

Eben explained the Plone community why he thinks that managing content is not important, and why managing community is. He believes that community-driven development will become increasingly popular and vastly superior compared to software developed by a single commercial entity. Hence the need for software and infrastructure that allow organizations to build large communities for a certain period of time.

We are moving to a world in which in the 21st century the most important activities that produce, occur not in factories, and not by individual initiative, but in communities, held together by software.

You can't sell Drupal, or any modification you made to Drupal. You can charge money for having to make these changes but you can't make these changes available under a commercial license. Why not? Because Drupal's license, the General Public License 2 (GPL 2), mandates that all modifications also be distributed under the GPL.

But when you are providing a service through the web using GPL'ed software like Drupal, you are not actually distributing the software. You are providing access to the software. Thus, a way to make money with Drupal is to sell access to a web service built on top of Drupal. This is commonly referred to as the web services loophole.

Some people say this loophole is inconsistent with the values of the Free Software movement. Others think of this loophole as an interesting feature. I'm in the latter camp. In fact, I predict that 2007 will bring a small tsunami of Drupal distributions built around a hosted service model.

Fact is, when the GPL was created 15 years ago, it did not really predict a world of web services. Version 3 of the GPL, expected to be released in 2007, will tackle this issue. It will allow developers to add an optional clause to the license that requires hosted service providers to share the source code and their modifications. This optional clause can be found in section 7.b.4 of the most recent draft of the GPL 3 (subject to change):

Additional requirements are terms that further constrain use, modification or propagation of covered works. This License affects only the procedure for enforcing additional requirements, and does not assert that they can be successfully enforced by the copyright holder. Only these kinds of additional requirements are allowed by this License: ... snip ... 4) terms that require, if a modified version of the material they cover is a work intended to interact with users through a computer network, that those users be able to obtain copies of the Corresponding Source of the work through the same network session.

Personally, I don't see us adding such a clause to Drupal. It doesn't bode well with the way people use Drupal, or any content management system for that matter. Here is just one example: most people theme their sites by downloading and modifying one of the available GPL themes. If we were to add the additional clause, this would no longer be desirable, because you'd be forced to share all your modifications, including your theme's. It is problematic when you want to create a unique site or brand.

So long live the web services loophole!

Lullabot, one of the available Drupal vendors, recently started to provide commercial Drupal training.

If we want Drupal to grow, it has to make inroads in the commercial market. For that to happen, we need a certain level of support that is currently not available. Commercial training is part of that.

So while I applaud Lullabot for providing commercial Drupal training, some members of the Drupal community expressed concerns that making profit of what is a collaborative work is a questionable business practice that shouldn't be promoted. Of course, people can believe what they want, and I don't want to come across as self-righteous, but I think that such people need to be whacked with a foam cluestick. Repeatedly.

A couple months ago, I wrote about the fact that Drupal needs more mentors. Well, the Lullabot team dived head first into the mentor role. Through their audiocasts and videocasts, and now by means of commercial Drupal training, they help people get on board. And them getting paid for doing what they enjoy doing most, and what is necessary for the Drupal community at large, is simply great. Rock on, Lullabot!