Drupal, monetary gain, penicillin

The core of what open source is meant to do is to change lives. What I meant by what I said in that statement is more of the land grab that seems to happen. And that we have seen happen with Drupal. (Don't really want to go into that here, you can look for posts in the other Japanese group for that).

But anyways, I really don't want to get into a debate about if Drupal needs to do things one way or another way for Japan to love it. What I want to do is get a group going that is fun, that helps people, and the tool we use is Drupal. If Japan embraces it or not, I don't feel is the concern of this group. The members of this group do embrace it, love it and want to use it. Instead of trying to work out what Japan wants and needs, I want to work out what is fun for the community of this group to do, and how we can give back to Japan. There is no greater work than work that changes lives of other people no matter how much you gain from it, at the end of the day when you can look back on your work and see the positive changes it has made on peoples lives, you can't buy reward or respect. Money is paper, change is forever.

So, I don't want this group to focus on the Monetary gain of anything for Drupal really, I want it to focus on the community that can be built and the lives that can be changed by using Drupal. I know my life has been changed by it and other open source software, and I am sure it can happen for more people too. In the end, I think that organic growth will do wonders for Durpal in Japan, but it is not my goal for this group, my goal is just to build something here that is fun to be apart of. If we bring up business talk for Drupal, great. If we help Drupal grow in Japan, great too. But there are people, in Japan, that love Drupal, that use it everyday, that want to get together with other users and learn and grow what they do all day long on their own. And I hope, want to give back.

It is a good post, and nothing against it, I think the Japanese people should thing think about this, but there needs to be an outlet to get away from that worry and just enjoy it. I think I see things a bit more field of dreams style here. If you build it, they will come (just as long as some dude does not say he owns it when he does not :-)....)

Does that make sense?

Too often, there seems to be this sort of us-versus-them attitude when it comes to open source software, as if those using it for profit must be by definition perpendicular and divergent to those using it purely altruistically.

In my experience, it isn't that way. I see it more as two parallel paths leading in the same direction, with a lot of crossover points. It's true that most of the time that I'm working with Drupal, I'm doing so for a paycheck. However, occasionally, I'm being paid to produce projects which are ultimately released for free (eg, Pathologic and PIRETS), or to produce patches for others' projects. There's the bleed-over of knowledge, too; the experience I gain by doing this paid work is often put to use in developing my personal projects. Of course, it works the other way; while working on my personal projects in my free time, or reading g.d.o or other sites, I'll discover something which will be useful in my work on the pay job.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that if someone wants to approach Drupal purely from a profit-oriented perspective, that's not necessarily a bad thing for Drupal, since these people can still make some valuable contributions to the project which will benefit everyone. Maybe that will be useful new projects; maybe patches; maybe just bug reports. It will still be a net improvement to the Drupal ecosystem as a whole, and if it makes someone some money, well, all the better.