The curse of big open source initiatives - how to finance big improvements in Drupal and make them sustainable in the long run

Slides: https://static.janezurevc.name/mountain_camp_2017/

Drupal is becoming huge and more and more enterprise-oriented. When you start flirting with the big players you realize that they come with complicated requirements. And they expect you to fulfill them. But how?

It is easy... You announce initiatives and gather the best minds from the community in them. They will work together and find solutions for even the hardest problems. But there is a small issue. Best minds cost a lot of money (because they create a lot of value and are in huge demand).

“But they can volunteer their free time!”, you’ll say. That is true. But it doesn’t mean that the work was “free” in that case. It simply means that people that were involved payed the bill by themselves. The price was, however, exactly the same.

There are other ways obviously. In this session we’re going to talk about requirements that need to be fulfilled, explore the possibilities that we have and think about which of those could be applied to big initiatives in Drupal and help make its development sustainable in the long run.

We will also, based on experience that we collected in the last 3+ years leading the Media initiative, elaborate on different types of contributions and specifically different types of funding that could be used to finance Media or similar projects in the future.