Backdrop: A Drupal Fork

For this episode, Addison Berry is joined by Nate Haug and Jen Lampton to talk about their new project, Backdrop, which is a fork of Drupal. This is a shocking move in the community, and has generated a lot of questions and concerns. We talk about the motivation behind the fork, who's working on it, and ask about the negative impact this can have on the community. We asked on Twitter and Facebook for what questions folks had, and we got a ton of responses. Addi asks these questions to Nate and Jen, directly from the voices in the community. Join us as we try to clarify what is going on with Backdrop, and the implications it has.

The questions we managed to get to are:

• I'd really like to know about their UX strategy to reach the sitebuilder - Bojhan (Twitter)
• Do you plan to release a commercial version? - Nadir Palacios (Facebook)
• Do you have a roadmap, what type of dev will it best suit, how do you differentiate against other CMS, are you planing a camp? - pdjohnson (Twitter)
• Any details on timelines would be great. Also the whole contrib module issue - Paul_Rowell (Twitter)
• At some point in the future module developers will need to pick @backdropcms or @drupal. Doesn't this profoundly hurt both? kcolwell (Twitter)
• Will current D7 or future D8 modules and themes work with #backdrop? - ModulesUnraveled (Twitter)
• What is the compelling reason for customers to choose Backdrop over established platforms like WordPress, Joomla, EE, & Drupal? - gdemet (Twitter)
• For nonprofits on tight budgets, D7 is already expensive. I worry D8 will be worse. Might @backdropcms help this? - hanabel (Twitter)
• Do you feel D8 prioritizes enterprise dev to the point where BackDrop's needed to fill smaller niche? - hanabel (Twitter)
• Backdrop rolls back 1.5 years of core commits, removing many many patches representing improvements to a whole host of systems. All the community work on efforts on issues related to things totally unrelated to CMI and Symfony was tossed out. Work on mobile, work on accessibility, work on lots of little fixes, all gone. With a small core team, how do you fix that? Does Backdrop just toss away all those improvements and the community that made them? It just seems like a lot of wasted work. - MarcDrummond (Twitter)
• How would you respond to criticisms that say #backdrop is a bad idea like this http://www.freelock.com/blog/john-locke/2013-09/drupal-8-vs-backdrop - ModulesUnraveled (Twitter)

[As a note, we will also have a podcast with Drupal 8 contributors to get another perspective on this story, so please understand that this conversation is not complete with just this podcast.]