Just back from DrupalCon Copenhagen 2010.

Drupal 7 is due for release in October 2010. The Drupal community have their heads down in the final coding sprint before the release. Not the best time for a Drupal conference you might think. But no quite the opposite, in anticipation of this major release and as Drupal approaches 10 years old, the conference looked to the future.

Drupal's growth has been in the not-for-profit sector providing social networking CMS based websites. Amongst Drupal developers there has been a strong sense of community and generally a feeling of doing good in the world. If there was a problem they'd solve it. Amongst users the deal was one of give and take, a proportion of what you gain from the use of Drupal you contribute back to the community.

The opening keynote 'State of Drupal' found Drupal's project leader Dries Buytaert considering where Drupal would be in 10 years. Undeniably the continued growth of Drupal would see the CMS as a web service for many, in the same mould as WordPress. Throughout the conference the user experience was given priority above all else. Mark Boulton, design consultant on D7, described it as having been re-designed principally with accessibility and the end user in mind. Drupal is gearing itself up for a much wider and less geeky uptake.  Many conference sessions were designed wtih this purpose in mind. I attended sessions where a show of hands generally revealed a high proportion of attendees were people running Drupal projects for clients and also people wanting to publish their own projects.

So here we were at a conference where the core team of Drupal developers, all volunteers, were solving the last remaining critical bugs, an enormous task, necessary for the release of D7.  At the same time the attention of the conference was with those who would be using the product and their requirements. There was a sense that developers were no longer principally developing for themselves but for the user. A thankless task comes to mind.

Surely a conflict of interest lay ahead. The Drupal developer is literally the core of the CMS. How will the opensource developer remain motivated when the corporates are creaming off the product?  As Dries Buytaert warned there’ll be a "huge influx of barely competent morons who have no interest in Drupal other than making a fast buck". The model of give and take dissolves.

Of course this is part of a much wider discourse around the sustainability of opensource. This is one of the biggest opensource projects being played out right now. It will be interesting to see how it unfolds and which, if any, business models emerge. Dries Buytaert hinted that Drupal Distributions, co-licensed by developers as super 'premium themes' may be a way forward.

We're already looking forward to DrupalCon London 2011.

Photo credit: by Elv on Flickr