When Dries predicts,
there will bring a small tsunami of Drupal distributions built around a hosted service model...
Is he talking about providers, like Bryght or CivicSpace, serving up a wide array of custom distributions and related services as a value add to their customers? What I don't quite get (assuming I'm reading this correctly), is if and/or how their distributions would be different than any distribution properly borne out of, and freely available to, the community. In other words, in addition to the convenience, specialized skills and services, will there be profiles/distributions that only will be available thru certain providers?
Hopefully the question was clear enough to warrant some further discussion and talking points....
Thanks
Comments
Might be
It is my intention to continue to work with and benefit from community network effects. I would like to offer many different distributions as a hosted service. Some might be custom (proprietary or copyrighted pieces of a particular client), but I hope that the majority of them continue to be developed and shared directly in an open environment.
Distributions as a hosted service are necessarily a bit of a different animal. Everything from the UI to the full integration of components is much easier to accomplish in a known hosting environment, or the complexity handled once rather than having to handle many different complex use cases.
That's a long way of saying that it is potentially a lot of extra work to get a downloadable distribution running as smoothly as a hosted one, so I can understand if others go a different route.
Collaboration and options
Thanks Boris! - Let me know if I'm understanding correctly... Sharing, open communication, and collaboration have a wide range of mutual benefits. Aside from special situations, the majority of the distributions would/should be available on both a hosted AND downloadable environment. There is, however, a LOT of work that would go into maintaining/updating/running a downloadable distribution. Hosted service providers add a lot of value and convenience for end-users, resellers, and others.
Apply all that reasoning to a real-world example... Upon completion, this artist site, could seemingly be part of this type of distribution. Tables turned, anything built openly within the community could provide the building blocks for a wide range of hosted and downloadable distributions.
Seems to me like there's a lot of common goals and ideas, thus room for meaningful collaboration and mutual benefit. If collaboration seemed like a good idea, are there any sort of ideal next steps or best practices (how do you put together a team, who would manage a distribution, what are ways to provide resources/fund development, etc.).
Hmmmm...does some of that make sense!?!
Gus Austin
My take was actually just
My take was actually just that Dries was saying he didn't intend to limit participation to not-for-profit contributors exclusively.
Otherwise, in as far as that goes, I haven't gotten the impression that being a distribution profile creator/distributor was more involved than coming up with a profile and distributing it as a responsible maintainer.
While webchick just pulled the docs recently (so I'm guessing they will be rewritten, soon), my hope is that the finished product will be involved enough to instill some self-discipline among developers by virtue of the effort required but not so difficult that people can't hack out quick and dirty profiles to use as site templates, to save clicking the "clean url test" link after every install, etc.
Something to match scratches to itches without flooding the Drupal core forum with more support requests.