Congratulations to the CMSExpo and the Joomla core team: they’re getting together again. Wilco Jansen will be the keynote speaker at next week’s event in Evanston, north of Chicago. Anthony Ferrara from the core was at the last event in Denver. It’s good to see so many people who understand that the community and commercial sides of Joomla are compatible.
Stand Back For a Moment …
… look at the list of other Open Source projects at the Expo … and appreciate just how far Joomla has come.
Right now it powers around 1% of the web. Consider also how well Joomla is doing despite how few resources it has, compared to other projects with which it’s bracketed at the Expo:
- Drupal. $7 million in funding for its founder, enough to hire a whole team of full-time developers to work on commercial projects that directly benefit the free version.
- WordPress: Owned by Automattic who have enough resources to purchase exciting new companies such as IntenseDebate, PollDaddy and BuddyPress.
- Alfresco: $2 million in funding.
- Magento: Developed by Varien, a company with over 50 full-time employees.
- DotNetNuke: Undisclosed amounts of Venture Capital funding.
It’s pretty clear that the Open Source ecosystem is professionalising rapidly and Joomla is increasingly left alone as an entirely community-supported project. Only Plone has a similar development model and that project is years behind Joomla. Joomla shouldn’t and won’t ever accept V.C. funding but I wonder if it’s possible that we’ve reached a watershed. We’re getting for professional-grade work and hours from unpaid volunteers. I wonder if we’re at the point when it makes sense to blend the community and commercial further. Does it make sense for the community to support core developers going full-time? I don’t know the right answer, but would appreciate your thoughts …