Building a Sustainable Model for Drupal Contrib Module Development

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Matt and Mike talk with Webform 8.5.x creator Jacob Rockowitz, #D8Rules initiative member Josef Dabernig, and WordPress (and former Drupal) developer Chris Wiegman about keeping Drupal's contrib ecosystem sustainable by enabling module creators to benefit financially from their development.

Episode Guests

Jacob Rockowitz

Jacob is an independent Drupal software architect / consultant and is the creator of the Drupal 8 version of the Webform module (formerly YAMLform).

Chris Wiegman

Chris is a developer at University of Florida specializing in WordPress, and is also a former Drupal developer. He speaks at WordCamp conferences around the country and has productized WordPress plugins in the past.

Josef Dabernig

Josef is an agile consultant at Amazee Labs, and is part of the D8Rules initiative, which was an effort to fund the development of the Drupal 8 version of the Rules module.

Transcript

Matt Kleve: Hey, everybody! It's the Lullabot Podcast, Episode 220. I'm Matt Kleve, a senior developer at Lullabot. With me as always, co-host of the show, senior front end developer, Mike Herchel. Hey, Mike.
Mike Herchel: Hey. How are you doing?
Matt Kleve: Great. So Mike, hey, Drupal is known as free software, right?
Mike Herchel: Free open source software, yeah.
Matt Kleve: So it's free as in beer, like you don't pay anything for it.
Mike Herchel: I never get that because beer is not free.
Matt Kleve: I agree. It's free as in speech, right, like Libre free?
Mike Herchel: In maybe America?
Matt Kleve: Yeah. It's also free as in puppies, right?
Mike Herchel: Just keep on going, Matt.
Matt Kleve: Well, that's as far as I can go, but ...
Mike Herchel: All right.
Matt Kleve: Today, we're talking about the line where that gets drawn where free doesn't always mean free because stuff still needs to get done and there are some folks out there who are trying to get some really good stuff done and ...
Mike Herchel: Yeah, and people need to make money. People ...
Matt Kleve: I was waiting for you to say it.
Mike Herchel: You have to make money so, yeah.
Matt Kleve: Of course. So we're talking about making money in the Drupal world, in contrib space and software, using free software.
Mike Herchel: Absolutely, absolutely. It's more complicated than it seems. So today, we have three guests with us.
Matt Kleve: Yeah, we've assembled a crack panel of guests.
Mike Herchel: First up, we have an Agile consultant at Amazee Labs. He is part of the D8 Rules Initiative, which was an effort to fund the development of the Drupal 8 version of the Rules module. DasJoe and drupal.org in Twitter. He's coming up on 10 years on drupal.org so congratulations. He's from Vienna, Austria, but he lives in Zurich, Switzerland for about three years now. Welcome, Josef Dabernig.
Josef Dabernig: Hello. Thanks for having me.
Matt Kleve: Hey, Josef.
Mike Herchel: Thanks for coming on.
Matt Kleve: Also with us today, we have an independent Drupal software architect and consultant. He's the creator of the Drupal 8 version of the Webform module, formerly known as the YAML form. He has been thinking, blogging and experimenting with making money in contrib. He's jrockwitz on drupal.org and jrockwitz.com and on Twitter. From Brooklyn in New York, it's Jacob Rockwitz. Hey.
Jacob Rockwitz: Hey. How's it going? Yeah, jrockwitz is just yeah, everywhere, jrockwitz. I have a unique last name so it gives me that ability to take over that name space.
Matt Kleve: It is a unique last name.
Jacob Rockwitz: Yeah, there's only one or two other people. There's one other jrockwitz, Julie, who I fight with in New York for email addresses, but I seem to beat her out 'cause I took over all those spaces. So I have to forward her emails every once in a while.
Mike Herchel: Next up, we have a developer at the University of Florida specializing in WordPress, a former Drupal developer back in the D6 days. He left so he could create and monetize products. Speaks at a lot of Word camps around the world, Chris Wiegman on Twitters and he lives in Sarasota, Florida. Welcome, Chris Wiegman.
Chris Wiegman: Thanks, guys. Looking forward. Glad to be here.
Mike Herchel: Yeah, thanks for coming on. So, let's kind of get into it. So, let's talk about maybe the history and the challenges of funding an open source and Jacob, you've been doing a little bit of blogging on this. Can you maybe lead us through some of your thoughts?
Jacob Rockwitz: Well, I think as you talked about the history of open source, I think like the free software movement and open source need to be just talked about and distinguished. I mean I'm going to just give my definitions to describe the difference between what free software is and what open source software is. Free software is software you can download for free and use, and the person who wrote it is just giving it away, but there's a caveat there that they might not give you the source code. Back in the day, you would get some program that would be really cool and you could just use it, but they weren't obligated to give you the source code behind it and you were just allowed to use the software.; Open source was this concept where people started to realize well, we want people to contribute and help build the "free software" and created this GPL where multiple people can use the software. They have the right to copy it, do whatever they want with it, but they're obligated to give back to the ... I think the obligation is always a little fuzzy to me, but they're obligated to share the code with the community and allow other people to use it.; Open source, I personally hate the term open source is free. I think open source allows freedom to do what you need to with code and to alter and manipulate it, but it's not free. That's my definition. I mean funding, I think the problem is as this stuff evolved, no one thought about funding and we're still struggling to define what funding is for open source software.
Matt Kleve: So you were making that distinction of freedom between the gratis free and Libra free?
Jacob Rockwitz: Yes. I think what's troubling is it started out as free software. Open source began as a free software movement and that was the origins of it. People were giving away software for free and no one was paying for it and this concept that open source is free just got stuck in people's minds. It doesn't cost anything. I mean a lot of people just assume it's free 'cause they can go download it and it isn't 'cause someone spent time on it, money, energy, and even when they download the software, the physical fact that they have to maintain the software, it's not free.
Matt Kleve: That's the joke I was making with free as in puppies, right? I mean you might find somebody giving away a puppy, but there's vet bills and food and time spent putting into that free puppy, right.
Jacob Rockwitz: Yeah, and I think it's like those two concepts. You're getting the puppy, but someone also had to make the puppy. It didn't come out of thin air. It came out of a lot of people's hard work and a lot of collaboration and people coming ... There's history behind every piece of open source software. Everything has some history. Rarely is it I was sitting home on a Sunday night and wrote this piece of software and that's what you're getting today. It's kind of amazing when you think about it. Someone sat home on a Sunday and wrote a piece of software and then 10 people used it and then 10 people contributed to it and now, you're getting this massive collaboration. In some ways, I'm starting to think of this as a cooperative.
Mike Herchel: So what is the current economic model of Drupal and open source? People are not selling the open source. How do they make money off of that? How do they live? Do they do it as hobbies?
Jacob Rockwitz: I think Dries' blog post about the SaaS loophole to open source is kind of where everything originates from is you can provide services around open source code. I'm keeping it very broad because it's more than software service. It's like consulting services, training services. I think that's what people have said is the model for open source or the most proven model.
Matt Kleve: For clarity's sake, that's what Lullabot does. We're a services organization. We're an agency. We work primarily in Drupal. We work with this software that's been released publicly to the community and happen to know a thing or two about it and are able to implement it for people's websites and they pay us for it.
Jacob Rockwitz: Yeah, and I think it's important. There are other systems. There's one, like an example where I don't think we're going to even go close to that 'cause Drupal will never do that is people do open source systems and then, they have a closed source version where ... We should move onto WordPress because WordPress doesn't have the closed source version, but they have the ... By the way, Chris, you should weigh in 'cause it's like the paid or supported version of ... I have air quotes right now. I don't ...
Chris Wiegman: Yeah. No, in fact, just some background make some sense, there's a plugin out there called iTheme Security. It's one of the biggest WordPress security plugins and that's where I had done the product, the WordPress side. Well, what we wound up doing is selling ... There's a free version of wordpress.org. Everything on wordpress.org has to be free, but then we simply ... There's a difference between open source where somebody can read the source code in PHP. I mean, let's face it, it's all kind of open source to some versus the licensing. So we started putting pro features so if you wanted the updates to the pro features, if you wanted the new code when we fix the bugs, if you wanted support, that's what we sold. So it was a very different ... That's a lot of what Gravity Forms and some of these others. Now some of them try to disable things with license keys and stuff like that, but for the most part, it's well, your license expired, you have what you have. If you need an update ...
Mike Herchel: How does that fit into GPL because I mean the theory of the GPL, any software that builds on the GPL also inherits that license and through that, people can clone your repo, edit it, throw it up on GitHub or something else. Is that something that you're having to deal with or is that just not part of the culture of WordPress?
Chris Wiegman: Not really part of it. A GPL, yeah, once it's out there, you can redistribute, so on and so forth, but your code that you haven't released, you're still developing so what they're paying you, they're paying for your time to continue to support that product is really what it more amounts to than the product itself.
Mike Herchel: Okay, so people are paying for support as opposed to paying for new features and new, I don't know, technology, an updated code.
Chris Wiegman: Correct, and part of support though, I mean from a developer's side of support, new features are part of that, right. A new version of, in the case Drupal, when Drupal 8 came out, if you had a paid product on that, your customers expect something new to go along with it. Or in the case of WordPress, as WordPress Rest API came out, this WP-CLI became more popular. The interfaces into that, people were paying for you to support those new interfaces with new features so that's support. It's a different view of support. It's not just somebody's at the end of the email replying to somebody when there's a problem. It's supporting the product over the longterm itself. It's not abandoned-ware is what it amounts to.
Jacob Rockwitz: I've researched every form builder. So WordPress, I've used three form builds and they all have slightly different models and some of them are not support just to be ... Like my personal take on the user experience. Like Gravity Form was fascinating to install 'cause-
Matt Kleve: What is that? That's a WordPress form builder?
Jacob Rockwitz: It's the most popular WordPress form builder and it's like the granddaddy. It's been there a very long time. I think there are better form builders, but it deserves the status of being like the WordPress form builder. The experience I had was it blew my mind 'cause I installed it and it was like, "Enter a license key" and I was like, "Okay," this stopped me. It said, "Enter a license key." I was like, "Oh, God. This is GPL. Wait a second. This is just wrong. I got to enter a license key. Okay. I'm going to go look for a patch to get rid of the license key. I'm going to go look," and I start searching to how to hack this so I didn't have to enter a license key and I found like a stack overflow statement that said, "Oh, you can actually not enter a license key and just hit submit and it'll let you through."
Mike Herchel: Nice.
Jacob Rockwitz: Then I did that and it installs, and they do prompt me to pay for a license, but the notion they have is we want people to do this. We're going to encourage them to do it, but we know they could hack the code so let them also if they're smart enough hit submit and that works. Ninja Form has the same thing, except you can go ... The code is totally not copy protected at all, but you have to go to their GitHub repo to get the code and install it and if you're on their website, they charge $50 and then, they provide a package link to the code. Then finally, one of them, final one, not going too far, Formidable, I had to hack the code. They had a license key, could not get through it. I searched the code for the word license key and I set the value to true and I mean, Chris, I'm kind of curious, did I violate any rule by doing that? Or that's actually perfectly acceptable 'cause it's open source code?
Chris Wiegman: It is open source code, but the way that ecosystem around WordPress seems to work is like I said, you're not paying so much for the software as it exists today. You're paying for the software as you want to see it tomorrow. I think it's probably the best way to look at how most people look at or justify paid for WordPress plugins. In the case of Gravity Forms, since I've been at UF, we get a lot back to it. I am in their private repo. It's all developed privately on GitHub, but I give them back the PRs and things like that, make sure that those work, make it to the next version. I'm paying to make sure things like ... WordPress has gotten really good on backwards compatibility and in the last few versions, saying to hell with it. Whatever automatic ones it features, it doesn't matter if it breaks things from the past anymore. So a lot of things tend to break with updates, 4.8.2 of WordPress, which was the last one, broke all kinds of plugins.; So I'm paying for a plugin developer to make sure that the plugin I'm using is fixed right away. There's a developer available. It's not a hobbyist that's "Well, this weekend I might have time to fix it." No, this is something we're paying ... In the case of Gravity Forms, I think there are 23 or 24 employees full time, all supporting Gravity Forms.
Matt Kleve: That's pretty ridiculous. The fact that you have one plugins with 20 odd employees. I mean typically, you might have in the Drupal space you have a large, I don't know, module like Display Suite comes to mind or something like that or Rules, which Josef is involved with. It's supported by maybe one, two, three or four people and it's tough to make money on that if at all.
Chris Wiegman: Well, here, I mean those 24 people are marketing. A good friend of mine is an evangelist for Gravity Forms. He does nothing but documentation and evangelism form. Other plugins such as WP Rocket, which is our major caching plugin has ... Oh, I don't even know how many people they have. A lot of them are email, at the end of that email to help people to get moving. WordPress definitely caters to the set-it-up-in-5-minute crowd, which is a fallacy to say the least in most cases. So a lot of these plugins wind up supporting it that way, too, but also you're not paying for the software itself. You're paying for the people around the software. It's really more the ethos on it.
Matt Kleve: I hear what you're saying, but the license key doesn't seem to agree with that.
Chris Wiegman: There is always exceptions. There's companies ... The plugin I was in the day I left, they took me off as a contributor to the plugin everywhere. They completely eliminated my name, which frankly to this day pisses me off because that is completely against GPL. There are companies that give it lip service and nothing more and that's a problem. However, there's a good amount of them that really do a pretty good job with that. I'm trying to think of Caldera Forms is another one, speaking on a form level, where he has license key for some features, but some of them frankly just use SaaS, there's some SaaS features built into it and there's connections to other services and things like that, but the vast majority of the plugins are still trying to ... They're justification for charging and the ethos they try to live by is you're paying for us to be here to keep supporting this, not necessarily for the code that's already out there.
Jacob Rockwitz: So can I do a pop quiz 'cause it's really a funny number. It's just 'cause I'm looking online. In 2015, I found the revenue statistics for WordPress. How much money do you think Gravity Forms made in ... By the way, this is an estimate from the web so it could be inaccurate, but how much money do you think Gravity Forms made in 2015? Think about Gravity Forms as the equivalent of Webforms in Word Press and by the way, there's 10 other competing products, but the revenue that they made based on ... Basically, they're calculating the number of downloads and how many people paid for it.
Mike Herchel: Okay, so let me try to answer this here because I'm not looking at any answers so I'm just going to kind of do the math. So WordPress controls, I don't know, 25% of the internet. So let's say they have, I don't know, maybe half a million customers, half a million customers, if they charge on a yearly basis, I don't know $10 a month or something like that?
Jacob Rockwitz: Yeah, $50 a year I think would be-
Mike Herchel: Fifty dollars a year? Holy crap.
Jacob Rockwitz: A year, a year.
Matt Kleve: A year.
Mike Herchel: All right. So you have a half a million customers at $50 a year, that's $25 million a year-
Jacob Rockwitz: They're not there yet. But keep in mind, probably most of those people are, but $5 million a year in revenue-
Mike Herchel: That's pretty ridiculous.
Jacob Rockwitz: That's why they have 26 developers 'cause they have $5 million a year in revenue and this is 2015.
Chris Wiegman: I've heard that number specifically in a couple places from people I would trust as well. Even the one I did was the security plugin, that company's well over $1 million a year and I've been told by people inside there that that plugin's over 60% of that revenue.
Jacob Rockwitz: So the agreement is support. I feel like I call it a gentleman's agreement 'cause the people ... Well, I think in the WordPress community, less than 10%, I would go with 5% really understand the GPL. The other 95% just are told to pay and they pay. I mean I'm simplifying it, but there's just an agreement in the community that you're not going to be like here's ... No one opened up gravityformfree.com and started giving away Gravity Form, even though-
Chris Wiegman: Those happen all the time. Those are constantly happening.
Jacob Rockwitz: Do they get shut down? Do they get shut down?
Chris Wiegman: They don't get shut down on the code. They get shut down for infringing on other info using a name, using trademarked names, using trademarked logos, things like that. That's what gets those sites shut down. They do not get shut down for using the code. The code's perfectly legal. It's when they start to use, yeah, anything else that's trademarked or anything else that's a problem.
Jacob Rockwitz: Wow, that's a pretty-
Josef Dabernig: I think also that's why for me, it gets like interesting when I compare the WordPress modules against the Drupal modules. I think in Drupal, we always had like a mindset where we wanted to collaborate as much as possible on let's say generic solutions and it's usually not the case that we have individual companies heavily behind a module, but it's rather like a community effort. At least that's ... I think one of the big backlash reasons also against ideas like the App Store in Drupal where the community really wanted to have modules for free without much of a business case in the modules. At the same times, agencies also like Amazee, we just provide services on top of Drupal so we sell the services around. That's not just support, it's like building websites with those modules, but that also gets us into the tricky situation why, for example, the Rules module it has 300,000 installations and there's not one single business case behind it so that's why it was so difficult for us as an initiative also not to get the whole funding.
Matt Kleve: We've talked about something similar like this on previous podcasts about how ... I mean kind of the differences between Drupal and WordPress and Josef, I think you've kind of pointed that out is a lot of Drupal's solutions are these generic solutions that ... Something like Rules so tell me about Rules. For somebody who only installs it because they're told by another module that they need it, what does Rules actually do for you?
Josef Dabernig: So the Rules module was actually created by fago or Wolfgang Ziegler, another Drupal developer from Austria that I used to work with. So I'm not the creator of the module, but I'm helping out with the initiative. What the Rules module does, it provides quite an abstract engine that's based on events, conditions and actions so you can react on an arbitrary event in the system, check if some conditions apply and then, perform arbitrary actions. That's tailored for site builders so you know in Drupal, you don't have to code everything, but you can click together a lot of stuff within the site.; A site builder, for example, when they use Drupal Commerce, they can react on a shopping cart event and they can check what the prices are within the shopping cart and then generate an email to be sent for example. So it really empowers those site builders that have the domain knowledge to add small functionality to a website. So it's usually not a hard requirement, but it's something that is very convenient and that, for example, also can use to let the client adapt the email texts and have them configure themselves automatic workflows on the website that can be very well integrated with a lot of other modules from the ecosystem in Drupal.
Matt Kleve: So this point and click interface that allows a site administrator to kind of snap together if this, then that type ideas?
Josef Dabernig: Exactly, it's if this, then that for Drupal.
Matt Kleve: So this was something that existed in Drupal 7 and then, the Drupal 8 upgrade was kind of a major shift for a lot of contrib. So this was not an easy thing for you guys to do.
Josef Dabernig: Yeah. The Rules module was already started in Drupal 5, workflow-ng, and it was developed during studies and also as part of a distribution. The Recruiter distribution was one of the first Drupal 7 distributions so we had like a company interest as part of the company to have it ready, but we also designed it as a very generic tool that can be reused in a lot of different places.
Matt Kleve: So I remember the Drupal 8 rules initiative when it was happening, one of the things that I recognized was you weren't always saying "Hey, come to the issue queue and help us out." It was "Hey, we've got the people who can do it, but they need to be able to have their time paid for," and you were asking for money.
Josef Dabernig: Correct, yeah. So, that was a decision that we made early 2014 when I worked together with fago at Drunomics. We realized that the Drupal 8 would never happen because of limited time 'cause of running a company and working on client projects and not having too much dependency on the Rules module ourselves. We thought about okay, what can we do to make it happen? So we estimated like the project, how much effort would it take for the Rules module core maintainers to upgrade the module and we estimated 1,000 hours. Then based on the community rate, we derived from it that the companies would allow the developers to work on it without making any profit. So in Austria, the community rate would be 45 Euros where the company can pay the bills, but doesn't make any profit on it. Yeah, and then we asked the community to help us with that.; My job in the initiative was to kind of start a campaign and together we laid out a roadmap what we're going to do and if we get funding, we would deliver. We got two-thirds of the money that we asked for funded and then, we also delivered those two milestones. Since then, the initiative has stalled so we haven't delivered the last milestone, which is unfortunate. So Rules is still in alpha version and the initiative is kind of stalled until we find either a developer that has time to do it and has the knowledge.; So the reason why we didn't ask people to just jump into the issue queue was because it's from our perspective, it's really hard, hard problems to solve and we didn't expect anyone just to solve those problems by jumping into the issue queue. We do that a lot. We also did trainings and coachings for Drupal 8 development at different camps and we onboarded ... So we have like over 100 contributors to do Rules module in Drupal 8 already so we onboarded a lot of contributors, but it never got to that level where it would really, really drive it entirely to the end. We got a lot of great contributions, but really doing the hard work of solving the Rules engine problems, that's still to be done and we didn't ... We basically right now we are looking for people to help us finish that.
Mike Herchel: Do you have an estimate on how much time or money it would take to kind of get that first stable release?
Josef Dabernig: Yeah. So the remaining estimate is around 250 to 300 hours, but also, we also kind of it depends on who's that person going to be with so ...
Mike Herchel: Yeah. If it was me, it would be a couple thousand hours.
Josef Dabernig: Yeah, would be the same for myself.
Mike Herchel: Yeah. So we're going to jump to a break. When we come back, we're actually going to talk about maybe solutions to this problem, how we can potentially bring more money to Drupal contributors and maybe we'll hear different projects on how they do that.
Matt Kleve: Keeping these projects healthy is really kind of the key, right?
Mike Herchel: Yeah, yeah. It's important and it takes money.
Matt Kleve: We'll talk about that coming up right after this.
Matt Kleve: Welcome back. We're talking about making money in the Drupal ecosystem. We just heard from Josef Dabernig about the Drupal 8 Rules initiative. Jacob, how did Webform contrast with that, or compare and contrast?
Jacob Rockwitz: I think Rules is the biggest ... The migration from 7 to 8, the history behind Rules that Josef just went to, sums up what everyone struggled with, with estimating how long it's going to take, trying to figure out how to do it, a lot of discussion on how to do it. In Webforms, there was a similar thing. It was 1,000 hours. That's the estimate that went in the main ticket on porting from D7 to D8. There's a lot of other history behind it. When that 1,000-hour estimate came out, that ticket just died. It just stalled.; My shortest description of the history of Webform for me was I needed a solution, so I created this other module, YAML Form. There's other podcasts I'm talking about it. I was like, "I can't do 1,000 hours." I never thought I'd take over Webforms. I just started this YAML Form module and just started working on it. Somehow I got so into it, it did take 1,000 hours, and it did take over the Webform space. It was that struggle. I did it because it was sexy. Webforms, YAML Form was a sexy project. Rules is not sexy. It's an API.
Matt Kleve: Yeah, people seek out Webform, like, "Oh, I need a webform. Let's go get the Webform module. We need Webform." Rules, I think, is like a, "Oh, this module tells me I need Rules, so I guess I'll go get Rules."
Jacob Rockwitz: Yes. Webforms, for me, I do these video screencasts of Webforms. I know, when I'm talking to an HR person, I could describe my contribution to Drupal, and they could see the feedback and understand the value that I add. Even while we're talking about money and open source, that was something I've gotten back in the last year from contributing to open source. It clearly is going to change my career. It even probably made me a little more valuable when I'm negotiating salaries. That's an underlying thing of open source, if you do it right and you can put your name out there, which is a whole separate discussion, is how do you create a name for yourself.; But Rules is really tricky. I've called it out. There's these API modules that the community ... The community is definitely struggling with upgrading contrib modules from D7 to D8, because the amount of work required is more than someone can do on a Sunday night. We're still struggling with it. It's about bringing money ... How do we fund it? How do we encourage people to do it, too?
Matt Kleve: Yeah, especially with the size of these two modules, right? If it were something simple, I think a Sunday night might get her done, but Webform is not an easy task.
Jacob Rockwitz: Yeah. One thing with Webforms that I have shown, and I've seen it in other modules ... There are some amazing modules that have been upgraded to Drupal 8. The rule of maintainer is clearly one of the most important factors with something getting ... In open source, it's one of the most important factors. I think there are stats where 95 percent of the work on an open source project is done by, quote, "the maintainer," or the one individual, because there are some amazing modules that no one's acknowledging, did awesome jobs going to 7, 8. Search API is stunning, what they have in 8. Yeah, IMCE just did it. That's a developer who looks for no recognition. I don't think the person has a description on their account page. I can't even figure out who's the developer on it. It does show this concept of you got to have one person who can find the time to focus.; Yet Drupal's tricky. Going back to the issue with Rules, you need people who can focus and solve long-term problems. I don't know. Someone who's committed to a project will take on technical debt, which I do on Webforms all the time. I'm constantly refactoring the code base to make sure it's maintainable. It's a really tricky problem, because people are doing it for free. We got to be clear. I think that the assumption on all these modules, it's been done for free.
Josef Dabernig: Yeah, I agree. Either there's a big business case behind it, or there's just a lot of passion behind it. If you can combine both, it's definitely driving it even better.
Jacob Rockwitz: I don't want to say certain things are not free. Commerce Guys upgraded a lot of modules to build their Commerce solution, like the address module and some other things. They're not doing it for free, but they have another business use case to do the work.
Matt Kleve: Sure. They needed Commerce to be out on Drupal 8, so they needed to be able to have all of the dependencies ready to go.
Jacob Rockwitz: Another one I did see that got upgraded that got relatively funded, and still there's blog posts where they're struggling, is the Salesforce upgrade to Drupal 8. There was a specific client that, quote, needed a Salesforce integration in Drupal 8, and they were willing to fund the initial kickstart of that project, but no long term. That is a big problem in the community. I want to emphasize that one. It drives me crazy, is I've seen agencies do a project, yeah, they have a requirement, they build this module, it's great, and as soon as the project launches, they move on to the next module. There's modules with patches that are two years old that no one's ever going to commit, because no one's maintaining it. That is a whole other can of worms in the Drupal community.
Mike Herchel: It gets complicated. One thing that I was throwing around in my head is, if I'm a module maintainer and I'm getting paid, I don't know, 10 dollars, 20 dollars per year for this module, why are people going to contribute to this module? In the WordPress ecosystem, there's something like 140 different form builders. Within Drupal, there's, I don't know, maximum one, two, or three. I think there's an advantage of having less, because they become more extendable. They become more of a use case where it can work for anything. But I'm going to be a lot less likely to contribute a patch to someone that's making, I don't know, five million dollars a year on their project.
Jacob Rockwitz: I agree.
Josef Dabernig: That's a good point, yeah.
Jacob Rockwitz: One thing about WordPress form builders ... I'm going to say it. Ready? Webform is more secure than WordPress form builders by far, because there's more eyeballs looking at the underlying form API that I'm using for Webforms. In WordPress, each one of those form builders has their, quote, own version of form API.
Matt Kleve: I was wondering about that. Yeah. Wow. So WordPress itself doesn't have anything like that?
Jacob Rockwitz: They don't.
Josef Dabernig: Correct.
Mike Herchel: Yeah, my understanding with WordPress is they don't have a form API, they don't have a render API, and a lot of the stuff is just one-off.
Matt Kleve: We talked about the field API missing, and that makes everything tough, as far as something like Views would be impossible.
Josef Dabernig: I was wondering, we talked a bit about how the Rules initiative raised money. We did that by crowdfunding, and we also did it by sponsoring. Jacob, did you do any funding for your work?
Jacob Rockwitz: No. I'm very, very independent on this. I have the time. This is an important thing. This is another nuance in Drupal that we need to get out there, is everyone has time to do this at certain points in their life. It's not a sustainable thing to maintain something like this, but when you're in college ... I did a blog post where I was pointing out Dries was in college when he started this. He had the time. He had the initiative. It changed his life, and he contributed to open source. I happen to have a pretty stable separate income coming in from Memorial Sloan Kettering that's allowing me to put in the 20-plus hours a week into Webforms. It's not a sustainable model, just to be clear. I will burn out, because I can't do 20 hours a week and not be paid for it for the rest of my life.; I didn't do crowdfunding, because I was just ... It's a tricky one. I have mixed feelings about ... Crowdfunding seems very tricky. There's been other initiatives that have worked somewhat. I'm fascinated by what's going on in Vue.js, where Evan Yue is being crowdfunded through PayTren to support Vue.js. He quit his job and is solely doing that. There's a case where it can work. It's hard. You're asking people to give money to an arbitrary fund that's getting used to, quote, "build code," compared to WordPress, where you're saying, "Okay, here's money. Here's support. I want the next version. I want you to answer questions."
Mike Herchel: It also begs the question, what about core development? If someone like, I don't know, you or Earl Miles is making a lot of money on contrib development, who's going to pay the core developers? Why should we pay core developers in that case?
Jacob Rockwitz: I think core is in a better place, to be honest. I think core, we've established that or we're pushing for this notion ... There's a difference. Organizations should support core. It's too difficult. You need full-time commitment, and organizations are starting to reap some benefits from supporting core. That's not to say, listen, contrib developers, including myself, at some point's going to have to get my hands into core, if I'm going to run into some form API issues, have some time to do it. Core's a slightly different ... I definitely think we have to distinguish the two. Core is harder. That's a big challenge.
Josef Dabernig: The core process is a lot slower, definitely, yeah. There's also a lot of ... We have more than 4,000 contributors, I think, which is really, really good number. Yeah. Drupal core has really, really improved its contribution reach over the years, like that whole contribution recognition credit system that has been constantly evolved. I think that was a huge success for...
Mike Herchel: Just the DrupalCon are, I think, a really big deal for that, too.
Josef Dabernig: Yep, definitely.
Matt Kleve: Jacob, you're also trying other ways to make money off of Webform, right?
Jacob Rockwitz: I'm experimenting and pushing buttons to see what ... I'm experimenting and thinking things out. I just did a blog post yesterday. I think you guys might have seen it. I did a paid promotion as an experiment, because I have a working relationship with Linguatec, who does translation services. Without totally plugging them, I think they offer a lot of value to the community, and they do huge contributions back. It's very important to emphasize that this is not an organization that's just paid to have their name in Drupal. They earn their name in Drupal, and they're listed when we do the commit credits and look at those. Linguatec sponsored a lot of multilingual.; I did a paid promotion just to see how it felt. WordPress has this notion, like content, or value, like, "I'm doing a promotion to see if people will click through and use Linguatec services." I just tested that, and I wanted to see how it felt. Personally, it felt wrong. I am now for we can't commercialize the interface of Drupal and have promotions in it. Drupal needs to rethink the whole UX when you install that software, because if you look at WordPress, they have such a better experience when ... Okay-
Matt Kleve: Are you the guy who put an ad in the administrative screen of Drupal?
Jacob Rockwitz: Yeah.
Matt Kleve: Okay. I saw a tweet on that, and I wasn't exactly sure who was responsible. I saw an angry tweet that was like, "Really? We're putting ads inside of Drupal administration now?" Okay, just checking. Just to be clear what was going on there. Okay.
Jacob Rockwitz: This is the most important lesson, even when people pushed back. I did it to see what would happen. I always knew from the beginning you had to be able to turn it off, or someone was going to fork. Every time I got pushback, when I emphasized there's a checkbox that turns it off, that was the end of the discussion. It helps, because that does open the opportunity to experiment with other ways to encourage contribution.; I also have an About page now on the Webform module now that lists me as the ... It says, "Hey, this is the Webform module. This is what it does. I maintain it. You can hire me." Then I have a separate tab to say about Drupal and the Drupal Association, which is something I ... By the way, I replaced that promotion to Linguatec with a "Join the Drupal Association" promotion that will appear in the next release, because I've also concluded that's a big thing. We need to get people to understand the concept of paying for open source, that it's not free. Paying a 15-dollar-a-year membership due to the Drupal Association is step one. Well, step one is creating a Drupal.org account. Step two is joining the Drupal Association. I'm working on that right now to just change people's minds. That's where my experiments are going, is ...
Chris Wiegman: That's really interesting for me coming from the WordPress. I was one of the first people in WordPress to put a ad in my plugin, and it was simple. Thirty days after you install it, to the person who installed the ad, it said, "Hey, give me a few bucks. Tweet about it," something like that. Dismiss it, whatever you want to do. That pissed a lot of people off, but this was, oh, seven years ago, eight years ago. It's interesting hearing this, which sounds like a rather recent discussion in Drupal. It also sounds to me like maybe with Drupal 8, if changes are a little less drastic between versions, there might be a little bit more open space for things to move forward on the commercial side of stuff, commercial product side.
Mike Herchel: Yeah. Supposedly, the upgrade path between Drupal 8 and Drupal 9 is going to be a lot smoother going forward. I like your idea of what you said, Jacob, about installing Drupal and how that compares with WordPress.
Jacob Rockwitz: It kills me.
Mike Herchel: Yeah. Can you go ahead and elaborate on that?
Jacob Rockwitz: Okay. It kills me. I use Simplytest.me a lot, because I'm starting the demo. It kills me, because I ... Okay. We all, in this group here, install Drupal using Drush, tight Drush installs. But Simplytest.me runs you through the installer. I keep having to stare at the installer when I'm doing demos, and it is the most boring experience and says nothing about what Drupal is to someone. Let's just be crystal clear. The installation process is the first experience someone new to Drupal has, period, is that's how they understand what they're getting in Drupal, is they install it. It doesn't say anything about the community. It doesn't talk about contributing, maintainers, joining the Drupal Association, having an account, even talk about the open source license behind Drupal. We're just missing opportunities. Then when you get in, you can't even see who built it. If you go to WordPress, there's a page that lists every maintainer. It's dozens of people with their profile picture, with a link to their website, giving them full credit in the software for the work they've done.
Matt Kleve: Yeah, but Drupal is code-centric. You have Maintainers.text. What does it need to be on the user interface for?
Jacob Rockwitz: Yeah. Then the counterargument is you go to ... I hate that one. "Go to the project page and take credit there." No one looks at the project page. They look at the software. That's why we're here. That's what we're looking at. The entire experience of engaging someone is in the software. Drupal.org's incredibly important, but it's not ... They came for the software. They're going to find the community, but ...
Matt Kleve: Jacob, you talked about having your own ... the mention of that you were the developer of the software as a part of the Webform interface. What is the permissions to view that?
Jacob Rockwitz: I think it's either you're administering Webforms or you're administer site configuration.
Matt Kleve: So not just viewing content. Somebody who's running Webform doesn't automatically expose that to their end user.
Jacob Rockwitz: Maybe, maybe not. By the way, that stuff I'm still trying to sort out, because that could be a permission. I think the scenario I'm running into is you make a permission that's "show About page," and obviously that defaults to the admin. Then people have control to default it to their other users, which they probably won't do. It's important, by the way. You have to have these things on by default. You can't have a checkbox that says, "Turn on promotions."
Matt Kleve: No. "Turn on ads" is never going to work.
Jacob Rockwitz: Yeah. It has to be there, and you turn it off, opt out. Yeah, don't ask for permission; ask for forgiveness after you've done it.
Josef Dabernig: If the ads will be shown to end users, there's soon going to be a pull request or patch filed or a fork to the Webform module to ...
Jacob Rockwitz: I got those.
Josef Dabernig: ... to fix that.
Jacob Rockwitz: Yeah, yeah. I want to be so clear. I got those. I got slightly nasty comments. Every time, I replied and said, "If you go to Administration Advanced, you check this box, and it's off." It made it a non-issue because, what patch are they providing? Someone's going to manually install a patch that they could go check a box, and if they knew what they were doing, they could write a Drush command that checks the box through CLI? Everything's got to be optional. It's very important. But I think it's important to note that 95 percent of the people using software or installing it, in WordPress, too, that's not them. They're not going to write a patch. They're not going to install ... They just want to use the software and get the benefits of the software and have it be supported.
Josef Dabernig: I liked that you mentioned that it would be good if the software itself would explain better. I think the software itself, Drupal could also facilitate more the interaction between the maintainers and the site builders, for example, or the people that website. For example, that we could file a suggestion for improvement to the user interface of that specific module of Drupal core, and so forth, through the Drupal interface, that would be awesome.
Jacob Rockwitz: I've experimented with that, too.
Mike Herchel: There's an initiative called the Out of the Box initiative. Right now, some of the discussion with that is developing a new theme, developing some demo content and stuff like that. Honestly, the whole installer thing that Jacob was talking about should be part of it. In my opinion, the ability to download modules, and download themes, and automatically install those through the UI is something that would be important for people coming in to Drupal. Obviously, for enterprise production sites, that's something that you would turn off. Your file system probably wouldn't allow it in general. For a lot of people who are running Drupal on shared hosting, that's something that is ... It's a pain in the butt to find what you need, to go search, to download a zip file, assuming that you're not using Drush, to extract a zip file, and then upload that to your server.; That's something that WordPress has figured out. If we could integrate some type of call to action to maybe support that module maintainer through that, to me that would be a win-win situation, where if you're using Drush or Drupal Console, you never see those prompts. But if you're doing it the old-fashioned way where you're either downloading a zip file and/or maybe installing it through some type of admin interface, that might be useful. Any thoughts on that?
Jacob Rockwitz: I got to weigh in on that, because ... Okay. I'm going to also give Webform a dis and say it has a lot more bugs than Gravity Form ever did in Gravity Form's evolution, because I'm one person developing. I can't see all the issues. I've done releases that have broken sites. I want to be really clear. It's in beta. It happens. Drupal has a lot more unstable code, because it's not funded and supported. Mike, the concept of people installing it through drush, you open that risk up. People are like, "Oh, I'll install Rule ... " Josef, people would install Rules in Alpha. That's a slight thing we have to be aware of.
Josef Dabernig: People are doing that, even if we warn that it's not ready yet.
Jacob Rockwitz: I know.
Mike Herchel: Yeah, but-
Josef Dabernig: There's a lot of active installs already.
Mike Herchel: Obviously, you can limit that type of thing to stable modules or beta modules, or something like that, or maybe have a dropdown at the top that says, "Only show stable modules," et cetera.
Jacob Rockwitz: Yeah. It's a nuance. I think the one thing I'll just throw out there is the support ... By the way, I love WordPress's ecosystem, but I want to draw a line, a very personal line, because people need to hear me say this. I'm absolutely against charging for modules. I want to really be clear on that.
Matt Kleve: Why is that?
Jacob Rockwitz: Because, as you guys have started hinting, there's this nuance. If you charge for modules, you'll create this issue. People will hold back features, which I have never done in the Webform stuff, like where, "Okay, I'm charging, so I've got to plan out my features so I add value, so someone's paying." It creates a whole different ecosystem. I'm against this notion of charging, but everything else in WordPress to me seems brilliant and makes a lot of sense. It's important as having videos on a project home page. It seems crazy that we can't do that. I got in trouble because I took a screenshot of my YouTube video and just put the screenshot linking to YouTube. People said, "That's not right. You can't hint that there's a video and it doesn't play in Drupal, on Drupal.org." It's like, "No, we need videos on Drupal.org to promote the products."
Mike Herchel: Part of this comes down to funding the DA.
Matt Kleve: Somebody once had the right filter and ended up putting one on there anyway, which made me laugh. This has been several years. Chris, you talked about you were the first guy who put an ad in your WordPress plugin.
Chris Wiegman: One of them, yeah.
Matt Kleve: Is that normal now?
Chris Wiegman: Oh, yeah. In fact, there's plugins out there to control the number of admin notifications.
Matt Kleve: So it's your fault?
Chris Wiegman: Yeah, you can blame me. Everybody else does.
Mike Herchel: How did that go over? What do you think Drupal should do to bring money to contrib developers?
Chris Wiegman: Two things I would say. One, yeah, don't be afraid of the ad, or ads, or anything like that. It worked great. Yes, there was pushback on it initially, but it's worked so great going forward that a lot of people are doing it. Two, these businesses are more than code. I've heard comments from you guys that, "Well, the Drupal community is more technical." I've got a master's in CS. There's a lot of guys who are good developers on the WordPress site too, but there's a lot more people that other than code. Drupal's so focused on code and code alone that it seems like oftentimes the community misses the picture, which is a big part of why I stepped away from it, five, six years ago now, and I haven't come back to it.; There's more to this stuff than code. Selling, planning out projects ... Jacob, I don't mean any offense by this, but the way you talk about project planning, yeah, when I was working on it, I had a year worth of features planned out. How do I keep developing? What have people been asking for? On a project, at the time when I left it, it had four and a half million downloads, what have people been asking for? That was a security plugin where anybody who diverge or something would be like, "Oh, this feature looks neat. When are you going to implement it?" You start keeping a running total of what people are asking for. Some of those features take an awful lot of time.; Then we had people that would work with marketing. We had a project people that would work with project management on these plugins and things like that to keep everything sold together, because the reason I sold it is I was the sole developer, like it sounds like you're doing with Webforms. Yeah, that gets old fast. There's only so much you can do with one person.
Jacob Rockwitz: Yeah, no. I agree. Personally, I'm good at this. I've done one website for 18 years, so I'm able to focus, but I'm still getting killed. QA is killing me. I cannot emphasize ... I can't physically do ... We write the code, and we need someone to test it, but the community is not ... That's not a role in the community.
Chris Wiegman: That's a big one with WordPress, too. I brought down about 15,000 sites one release.
Matt Kleve: Chris, from the WordPress side, what's the perspective of just downright buying plugins? Is that a thing?
Chris Wiegman: I encourage it. I encourage people that ask me what to set up. If somebody wants a form solution, I push them to Gravity Form or Caldera Forms quite heavily.
Matt Kleve: But you were saying that that's buying support. Is that buying the plugin, or is that buying support?
Chris Wiegman: It's both, because if they don't have the initial code base ... Jane wants to build her cooking blog, and she wants a good contact form type thing on there. She doesn't have the existing code. Go out, buy Gravity Forms, and they're going to help you get set up where you go wrong, things like that, through their support, and this and that. After a year, most people don't wind up renewing their licenses. The blog sits there for the next six years. The software still works. It might have issues. The longer it is since the last security update, obviously the more issues you're going to have. But they've got the software now, and now they've been able to set it up. Even if their blog didn't go anywhere, they've gotten what they wanted out of the thing. Does that make sense?
Matt Kleve: Yeah. There have been people who have tried to sell Drupal modules in the past. There was a site several years ago even, maybe even in that Drupal 5, 6 era, that was a lot of commercial type modules. One that sticks in my mind was it gave people the ability to buy a role, which turns out is a fairly decent Google term, because people know what a role is and they want to be able to assign permissions to a user if they paid the bill or not. It didn't end up going well for them. I remember there were plenty of people who were prolific Drupal contributors who said, "Shoot, it's GPL. I'm just going to buy the module and put it on my own GitHub, or put it on Drupal.org, because I can."
Jacob Rockwitz: Can I just add in? WordPress has this agreement, because also you're trying to get the ... My experience with WordPress is it works like any other software you would buy. It just happens that underlying in the software that you're buying is the GPL and encourages people to contribute back to the software that they might buy. Experienced developers might not buy it, but the experience is buying software. There's nothing unique about it. I'm not saying unique, but it's like ... It feels the same way as I pay for PhpStorm. You go to the website, you give them your 50 bucks, and you're good to go. If you have a problem, they'll answer a question. With Drupal, the Top Shelf thing, people are afraid of it. The Top Shelf modules, by the way. That was one of them, right?
Matt Kleve: Top Shelf. Yeah, that was the more recent one. I was thinking MoneyScripts was the site back in the day. It's no longer around. If you Google for it, there are a lot of pissed-off people who were like, "Hey, I bought this, and now they're apparently gone." It's been several years now, but yeah.
Jacob Rockwitz: And you're like, "It's open source. You can do with it what you want."
Matt Kleve: Exactly. It's actually interesting. I had a friend on the security team who sent the creator of the website an email that said, "Hey, you actually have a bug. I was doing an audit for a client. You have a bug in your module, and you should get this fixed." As I remember it, they weren't very happy to hear that.
Chris Wiegman: We've seen some of that, though, too, with Word ... Thesis Theme you guys would probably find fascinating, Jacob, if you're not familiar with the history of Thesis Theme. You probably heard of Genesis. Genesis is probably the single most successful WordPress product sans hosting, and maybe WooCommerce. It's a theme framework that those guys are just going gangbusters. Last I looked, they were doing well north of 10 million a year on that, just for a theme framework. They had a competitor at one point that was Thesis Theme. Thesis Theme decided it wasn't going to go GPL. It was going to close the license off, and nobody could touch the code.; If you were to Google Matt Mullenweg versus Thesis Theme, Chris ... I can't think of his last name anymore ... was the guy who ran Thesis Theme. That was quite the battle to keep the code itself GPL. It was quite a turning point with a lot of this stuff, too, because that's when a lot of us developers and a lot of people that were building products and everything else started realizing that the code is not necessarily the product we're selling in most cases. It sounds like with Drupal, people get mad because that support's not there. They think they're paying for something that's going to be well supported in the future. That's not always the case.
Jacob Rockwitz: They're not. That's the problem. I just want to emphasize, people think ... No one's paying for support of Drupal modules, per se.
Josef Dabernig: I think we've been bashing Drupal a lot. I think we should also recognize that it's still working. There's a lot of module out there, even, for example, the Rules module. Even if it's not funded, it's working. If people find bugs, they find bugs. They file it in the issue queue, and they solve the bugs. Even though, if we have not solved the funding issue entirely, I think we still can say that it's working quite well.; On the one hand, we might have a system where you can directly fund the maintainers with paying money. On the other side, I think in Drupal we have a lot of agencies serving client websites. Those websites that we run on Drupal, if we run into a bug, then we fix it. It's clear that our clients will pay us to fix a bug in Drupal. If that bug is within one of the modules, then we just fix it there. It's not the way that we pay the maintainers to fix it, but it's the way that we as agencies, we just fix it in the module. Hopefully we also publish the patch in the issue queue, and then another Drupal developer can take a look at it. In the end, it gets into those modules. It's a process where the money is not visible, but still there's money in the background paying the developers that work on it.
Chris Wiegman: That's a very different model, too. You're very right. One thing I'll point out with WordPress and the Drupal difference is, WordPress has that same ecosystem. There's companies like 10up, Human Made, that are rather large agencies doing extremely large projects, contributing ... 10up gives quite a bit back to core. WebDevStudios is another one. 10up is where I worked before I came back to the University of Florida. In a lot of ways, it's WordPress's answer to Lullabot and Drupal. It's a very large-scale agency. One thing Drupal doesn't seem to even want to focus on at all is these end users that build this WordPress ecosystem. All these Gravity Forms. Like I said, and Jane makes a recipe site. That's not even on Drupal's radar, to try to hit those types of people. That's a very big difference when we're talking about how we're going to make this type of ... how you want to build that community, how you want to build that ecosystem.
Mike Herchel: That's a good point.
Jacob Rockwitz: But Drupal's ecosystem, I'm on board with Dries' who are building ambitious ... Listen, I don't like calling it ambitious sites. Drupal's more for enterprise, for large-scale sites. I don't think we're going to get to the WordPress ecosystem with those smaller end users. I think that ship might have sailed. I think that's okay, because I agree with Josef. Drupal's got some amazing stuff. The collaboration and what is built, Drupal's a better platform than WordPress. I think WordPress has a better ecosystem for funding development, but personally I've looked at the two different ... what's going on in ... Even coding standards in some WordPress plugins are all over the place. If you look at most Drupal modules, everyone's following the same coding standards. It's a more collaborative ecosystem. The funding challenge is we need to figure out how to foster that collaboration, make it work better, strengthen it. Charging for an individual module might not do it, but we have to figure out, I don't know, how to make transactions easier.
Matt Kleve: I think it's always a possibility, too. It's no secret who's doing work on a module. You can always hire somebody directly, or ...
Jacob Rockwitz: I've done that. I've done it for a few things. The problem is it's really expensive in time, meaning to negotiate that transaction, the back and forth, "I have this feature. Here's the feature. It's a college; therefore, I've got to fill out this stack of paperwork to do a 1,000-dollar transaction." It doesn't scale.
Mike Herchel: Yeah, that's a good point.
Matt Kleve: You can always make micro transactions for every Webform submission, since you've got rights to whatever you want to put in the repo.
Mike Herchel: You can include that Bitcoin JavaScript miner.
Matt Kleve: That'll work, too.
Jacob Rockwitz: Just to say, with this whole transaction stuff, I honestly, I do think Bitcoin or some sort of electronic exchange of money is going to be key. If we're thinking about the future of this type of transaction, it's got to be digital currency.
Matt Kleve: Just send us all a few Bitcoins, and we will all be happier.
Jacob Rockwitz: Or Drupal coins.
Mike Herchel: So Drupal should have an ICO, an initial coin offering.
Matt Kleve: Of course.
Jacob Rockwitz: Yeah. Drupal dollars.
Chris Wiegman: Ah, at WordPress, we just say, "Show me the money."
Matt Kleve: Cash.
Mike Herchel: Yeah, I honestly think the whole digital currency thing is making things a little bit too complicated initially. There's all types of different transactions that need to be recorded with Bitcoin.
Matt Kleve: But that's another show.
Jacob Rockwitz: Yeah. It is. I brought it-
Mike Herchel: It hinges.
Jacob Rockwitz: It's long-term thinking, because we have an international community.
Mike Herchel: Yeah, that is true.
Chris Wiegman: Does Drupal have something like ... WordPress has an unofficial initiative called Five for the Future Matt Mullenweg started two years ago, which is basically an encouragement for every WordPress company, agency, or product to give five percent of their time back to basically core development or something close to the core ecosystem. Is there anything like that in Drupal?
Mike Herchel: I don't know if there's anything official. Dries Buyteart has blogged about similar things multiple times. Lullabot has a lot of contributors contributing back, as do a lot of other companies. On Drupal.org, within the Drupal.org marketplace, the companies are ranked by the number of patches and issues that they have contributed back, so there's definitely some incentive to do so.
Matt Kleve: Awesome. Thanks, guys, for joining us. We appreciate your time and talking about dirty capitalism and all the wonderful things around it. Josef, do you have any final thoughts or anything that you'd like to plug about Rules?
Josef Dabernig: I'd like to thank all the sponsors and contributors to the Rules module. Especially recently, we have seen a lot of great movement in the issue queue. I hope that the 8 Rules initiative can also get to a final release in the next year.
Matt Kleve: Thanks. Jacob, any final thoughts?
Jacob Rockwitz: I feel like the music will start playing as I start talking. I think that, for me, I didn't really emphasize, I think the most important thing in the community is we need a change of mindset. We need to start thinking about the problem and thinking differently about the problem. It doesn't have to be extreme, but open source has to rethink this whole approach. The most simple statement I would make is, anyone that goes and installs open source should know who built it, and that it's not free, it's just that it gives them freedom, and that they need to contribute back. We're talking about dollars and cents right now, money, but I think the emphasis on contributing back is more than just money. It's time. Filing an issue if you find a bug and not being like, "Someone else will do it." We need to change that message. It's the mindset, changing the message that's out there in the community, and it takes time. It's going to take years to adjust it. I have a lot of faith that Drupal can do it, but we need to start having these conversations like we just had now.
Matt Kleve: It sounds like you would take any patch testers in the issue queue of Webform.
Jacob Rockwitz: Yeah, I'll take any help. Of course. I enjoy it. It's part of why I love the project of working with so many people.
Matt Kleve: Awesome. Chris, any final thoughts? Did we turn you? Are you ready to come back to Drupal?
Chris Wiegman: Maybe I'll show up at a DrupalCamp at some point. Actually, we've got a Drupal site where I'm working right now that I think we're going to be switching over to WordPress before too long. It's really interesting, the different focus. It is the focus that allows a lot of the money to come into WordPress. I don't mean that as a negative aspect on Drupal by any stretch. It's a very different focus on who we're trying to target. Listening to that and how that plays out in Webforms and in Rules and all that to me is just fascinating. I appreciate the opportunity to hear some of this.
Matt Kleve: Mike Herchel, it's your show, man. Any thoughts?
Mike Herchel: Yeah, thanks for coming on. Hopefully I'll see everyone at Florida DrupalCamp. It's February 16th. Chris, and Jacob, and Josef, come across the ocean.
Matt Kleve: It's way better than WordCamp.

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About the host

Mike Herchel

Mike is a former senior front-end developer at Lullabot, a lead of the Drupal 9 core "Olivero" theme initiative, and an organizer for Florida DrupalCamp.

About the host

Matt Kleve

Matt Kleve has been a Drupal developer since 2007. His previous work in the media inspires him to create lean, easy-to-use workflow processes.

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Jacob Rockowitz

Chris Wiegman

Josef Dabernig

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