business

This (somewhat old) post from Zacker does a great job summing up a catch-22 that comes along with an open source community like Drupal (allow me to excerpt):

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• most of the value created by the Drupal community that vendors and consultants rely on to sell as services to customers come from unpaid core contributions
• many of the seasoned Drupal core hackers are getting job offers left and right to come and do Drupal consulting full time.
• This is creating a scenario in which while many more people are paying their bills through Drupal hacking and more and more business are built around business value created by the Drupal community, it is not getting any easier to make sure the heavy lifting on core work is getting done.

What can we do now to make sure that some of the money coming into the community over the next year is put back in to supporting the core work that we as a community are relying on?

Quickbooks is coming to drupal soon, but I may need help from the community.

I currently have a module that uses SOAP and the RDS (Remote Data Sharing) server from Intuit (a program that runs locally on your machine locally and runs. It acts as a "proxy" b/t you and your quickbooks file, and accepts SOAP requests and pulls the information from quickbooks for you and returns the information in XML format). The module is pretty simple in form currently.

• On a users "My Account" form, an admin user is presented with a drop down of current customers from Quickbooks. The admin then selects what "customers" the registered user can view.

I don't know who approved http://groups.drupal.org/the-business-of-drupal -- I recommended to the person who created with it to use/merge with the Consulting group instead (which is closest, in my mind), and didn't approve it.

There are some good posts in there, and I'd like to merge it, and commented on that here.

Thoughts?

For us (an end user who occasionaly develops for others) the concept of a six monthly update that does not have backward compatiblity is one of the biggest worries in using Drupal. While I understand the ideal and applaud it, it does bring up the issue of leverage in regard to the financial investment made.

We want to see a return on any investment we make so having to start an upgrade cycle every six months if going to be very hard to justify especially as the size of our sites mean that we are going to be constantly programming to stay still. Our most recent project has had over 400 man days in development and uses a huge number of contributed modules to update to V5 is going to be a major task.

[Edit: this group is being merged with consulting, to cover businesses being run on Drupal, as the needs and discussion have very close overlap]

This group is designed to help people who are reliant on Drupal for their business.
Ideas for topics:

Starting up a new business
Joint Ventures / Partnerships
Supplier discussions - Good / Bad / Cheap / Reliable ?
Funding a company / Looking for Venture Capital
Operational issues for businesses
Financial and commerial issues for business
Co-operative Marketing & or advertising
Exchange of Services or facilites e.g. I can give you hosting if you can do some coding