Dries, founder of the Drupal project, posted his thoughts and wishes from 20 years.

He included 3 birthday wishes.

The first one, never stop evolving¹, includes this passage:

First and foremost, we’ve been focused on a problem that existed 20 years ago, exists today, and will exist 20 years from now: people and organizations need to manage content. Working on a long-lasting problem certainly helps you stay relevant.

So, roughly, the short phrase for this is “content management”. It was very interesting to read this, because it’s not at all the reason I contributed to the Drupal project.

I got involved using it personally, joined the mailing list, and starting contributing. It was my first open source project and community and I learned so much and have so much to be thankful for to the project, to Dries, and to all the wonderful people I got to meet.

My first contributions were around CSS class names and the recipe module.

Anyway: I got involved and built a company around Drupal because I wanted to enable personal publishing. Not the content management part, but rather giving individuals and groups agency over their content: using open source software to publish their own words online. Without having to go through mass media of a newspaper or other publisher, which is all there was at the time.²

I’m still on that same mission, in part because of Drupal being built as a full stack LAMP application: much too hard to host and maintain by individuals. This reduces user agency: you’re relying on someone else to have the knowledge and expertise and trust to run and maintain a server stack, and hopefully back up your content.

I’m pleased that people are in part solving this by banding together as co-ops and collectives.³. Some of the first worker cooperatives that I was exposed to were building on Drupal, like Agaric, or Vancouver’s CanTrust Hosting Co-op.

My goal: a user with a smartphone as their only computing device should be able to create and publish directly, and participate in the web.

Alongside of this is an understanding that humans make software and can be supported directly, which wish #3 is about.

Wish #2 is continued focus on ease of use, with a specific mention of out-of-the-box experience.

I hacked together SQL queries and config files to invent install profiles for Drupal, with many more capable people doing an actual good job of this afterwards ;)

Mostly, the Drupal community hasn’t internalized what it wants to be out of the box. Modules rather than products. It has gotten better, but there is a lot more to do here.⁴

And, the immense gravitational force of Dries’ commercial company Acquia being focused on (enterprise) content management pulls things in that direction. This is also at odds with my personal interest in individuals and groups, who have very different needs

This is not really this category, but I have been reflecting on it so will include it here:

At the time (in the early 2000s) I had little to no awareness of the concept of equality and inclusion. Around me I saw mostly white, young, and primarily male faces. I was - and am! - so privileged to be able to spend time participating in OSS communities.

This, too, is usability and ease of use.

Wish #3 resonated most strongly with me and I think Dries and I are very aligned on this goal: Economic systems to sustain and scale Open Source.

He links to a shop local analogy: think about the software you use, and understand that choosing software with an open source license pays dividends for you and the people around you.

Related to privilege, I am thinking a lot about “open source as a job”. I have long tried to get open source devs paid in different ways. Now, I think it’s time to have apps as a small business. Can we enable devs from around the globe to earn a living from building and maintaining apps? Yes, we can, and we must — and move past just North America and Western Europe as the focus for this.

All of the things I’ve mentioned are a core part of Fission, my current company:

1. User owned content and personalization of apps
2. Out of the box components for users and developers to build apps
3. A model for users to participate with and support developers directly, so devs can have “open source as a job”

I am so glad to have met Dries and have him as a friend, so we can continue to work together, debate, and argue over priorities over how our missions overlap ;)

Dries is one of the very few people on the planet with 20 years of history of guiding a large open source project, and the changes and awareness of issues related to this that has happened over that time.

Congrats to him, to the entire Drupal community. Here’s to another 20.

The hashtag #MozillaLifeboat is highlighting the ~250 people laid off by Mozilla.

Here’s Mitchell Baker’s official announcement.

Daring Fireball has further links and commentary, including that the layoff number is “about on-third of its workforce”:

Firefox was very popular, and Google paid Mozilla a small fortune to make Google search the default in Firefox because it was so popular. But then came Chrome. Why should Google fund Mozilla when Chrome is about 10 times more popular than Firefox, other than out of the goodness of their heart?

It is a very good thing for the world and the web that a truly independent browser exists from a privacy-minded company, but there’s not much of a business model for it unless it’s popular enough to get the dominant search engine to pay for placement.

The Open Web, open source, Web3, global Internet commons infrastructure. Security. Privacy. Data ownership. We’ve got a lot on our plate that is looking pretty concerning.

I pretty much felt the same in the early 2000s, facing down FUD from Microsoft vs. open source. And we … won? Sort of? Except now it’s time to reboot again, because the ad supported web and big tech owned open source is an awkward place to have ended up.

I don’t know Chris Riley who just got laid off and tweeted this, but I’ll bold the key part here:

It’s been a heck of a ride at @mozilla for the past 7 years. But this is where I get off the train too. I’m sad; I’m going to miss the people, a lot. For me, my calling to make the internet better will continue. I just need to find the right next venture for it. #MozillaLifeboat – @MChrisRiley

We’re all in the same lifeboat. Grab an oar and get involved.

The Sunlit 3 beta is available, and now open source.

Is an open source “Instagram” possible?

I had a long discussion with an artist about moving off Instagram and Facebook. I told him he was putting photos up inside a mall, and he didn’t disagree. Because he can sell inside the mall.

He was uncomfortable about it. That I was kind of accusatory, shouldn’t he go first, to walk out of the mall and lure people outside instead.

So how do we encourage people that doing street graffiti is something they might want to do?

Putting my technologist hat back on, an open source mobile app like Sunlit is an interesting starting point.

Supporting Micropub and WordPress are great starting points.

Now what about a SquareSpace interface? Drupal and Joomla? Mastodon?

Tumblr? Flickr?

This mix of open source and protocols and networks gets us to an interesting spot.

Does multiple forks of Sunlit help? That is, say other people use the code and deploy apps to the App Store. Can that be additive to a network of users using open protocols and platforms? I’m sort of asking if we can kickstart a more open and federated network.

What if that app added “Buy Now” buttons? Where users could add their own links to a place where they could buy what is in the photo. Or tip the photographer!

Thanks @manton for open sourcing. That begins to give us the opportunity to contribute and build upon what’s there now.