 Ah, more people. So welcome to the session, selling Drupal modules and distros. My name is Taco, telling you a bit more about that. But first of all, I'd like to know who you guys are. So who of you are developers? That's most of you. Good. And project managers, owners of businesses? OK. Who of you thinks I'm here to destroy Drupal? Jem? Jem, please leave. Who of you are thinking about doing something with products in Drupal? Who of you think that Drupal developers should work for free? Nobody. Half. We should talk. We got some comments online. I don't know the guy, but he looks like he wants to wet his beak in some sweet, sweet cache. Totally agree. Just offer a full module full of bugs. Sell a premium module with the fixes. This is a good business model. And even some further people are really upset about the destruction of what makes Drupal so awesome. So there's enough debate, right? And we should clearly talk about this today. I just spoke to the session owners. Even they had a debate when choosing the sessions over the session if it either should be discussed. So everywhere I come with a little bit of a pass cut as well. We had some really good discussions, which is good. But let me introduce you today to myself, to my company, to our IDs. And I think you'll find out that we're not here to destroy Drupal. We will try to make Drupal better. We'll try to make the lives of your developers better. Try to make the lives of your clients better. And we want to experiment with doing that in the Drupal community. So yes, I'm not here to destroy Drupal. My background is in industrial engineering. So I'm not a developer. Although I did build our first Drupal website. But if I do it now, people will just laugh at me. So I should not touch it anymore. I didn't finish it. I was working so hard for the company that I didn't finish my master degree. So I'm really dedicated to the company because basically I don't want to fail again. I'm eight years in Drupal. And I'm four years board member of the Dutch Drupal Association. We do a lot of cool events. The Drupal Jam, which is actually today. It's just over in the Netherlands. We have almost 400 people attending. The biggest Drupal Jam ever. So that's pretty cool. We organize the Splash Awards. Jams helps me out with this as well, where we award the Dutch Drupal projects with a prize. We call the Splash Awards. We want to go internationally. So maybe we'll hear about this a bit more. And we do a local event where we have our Drupal agency called Dinner with Drupal, where we give people food, beer, and talk about Drupal, which is really cool. My company is called Golgorilla. We're a full service agency. We were founded in 2008, as I said, during the university years. We're about 25 people. And we have some partnerships, for example, with Limberg, who are here today. So they joined the team now and then. We work for clients as Greenpeace. Greenpeace International, it is. T-Mobile, we introduced today that we will launch 15 government sites for the Dutch government and growing. And our goal is to be as close to our users as possible. And I think with the image, when you entered for the guys who were here, that's also our photo we used, smashed up. Want to be really close to people and make really good software like this. It's not always pretty, but we get close. All right, so today I want to talk to you about why selling products, why selling modules, why we want to sell distributions, then how to sell them, GPL, Marketplace, how can we do this. And next, what happens if there's some sort of commercialization within the open source community? And does this mean that we will destroy the open source community, or will it go together hand in hand? To start, though, I want to say that, actually, the Drupal Marketplace is already here. Who do you know, the Drupal Marketplace? No hands, one hand. Acura, that's one, yes. I was actually talking about this one. You guys know this, Code Canyon? So you can go to Code Canyon, you search for Drupal. There's a bit over 100 modules for sale right now. I'm not sure if you saw this, but this guy sold this model almost 3,000 times. And quick calculation, he made almost $70,000 with this. So when we're talking about selling Drupal modules and distributions, it's already happening. And for many things, we are already, productization is going on in Drupal community. So we can either ignore it, or we can try to find a way to work with this. And also, when you look at the sponsors of Drupalcon, Acreap Product Company, Pantheon is a product company, Phase 2, BlackMash, these are all companies who are operating in our ecosystem. They're funding this wonderful Drupalcon. Gold sponsors, almost half of them are product companies. So there's already a lot of productization going on in the Drupal community. And they are funding us, they are innovating, they're bringing us really cool things. So we should look at them, like what are they doing right? Why do they wanna do this? And what can we learn from that? So let me tell you a little bit more about services versus products, because it's very important to understand what's the difference between a product and a service. So most of the time when you go to a website, go to any Drupal agency site, you see something like services in the menu. They're selling services. I think some of you can recognize their companies in here. So this is mainly when a client asks, what can you do for me? So client comes and say, can you do this for me? Can you do that for me? They have a question, and we need to answer that question. It's not tangible, you cannot touch it, it doesn't have anything to start, and you cannot scale it. That means you cannot sell it 100 times over. If you're one person, you cannot sell your hours 100 times on one day, only once a day. You get paid per hour, and things like strategy, development, design is usually done as a service. You will start working, doing the work in the future. So you sign a contract, and then you'll start working for it. So this is the service industry. Most of the times when we look at Drupal, the Drupal agencies, this is what we think about. Drupal shops, working for clients, making websites, making apps, and we get paid per hour. And this works for a lot of companies, especially the big ones. So when you look at the websites of product companies that operate in the Drupal ecosystem, you see they say products, Acquia is the top one, you get this call to action, it's like sign up now, and very popular, get started. So this is straight away when you go to a website of one of the agencies, or product agencies in the Drupal community, you can see what they're working at. And most of the time the clients, they get asked what can you give to me? It's tangible, even if it's digital, it's a product, and it's scalable. You could sell 100 on a day instead of services which have a limited amount, limited capability. You pay per usage sometimes, you pay one times the price. Sometimes you pay per month, this is what we see now a lot, which suffers as a service. So this is all products because it's scalable. And usually it's work you've done in the past. So you have to make an investment first and then you start selling the product. And it's just the other way around with services. You start selling first and then you start working on it. There's a lot of hybrids going on in the community and as a Drupal agency, I know this is nice. For example, the support contracts, everybody loves support contracts. It's almost a product. Trainings, really good margins, audits that we sell. So actually when you look at service companies in the Drupal atmosphere, they already sell sometimes products. So trainings, audits, hosting as well. We love these contracts because they go on and on. You get monthly fixed income. So even when companies say they're not selling products but services, they have these contracts and it's almost like products and they really like it because it gives them a fixed amount of income every month. And the other way around is also true. There's a lot of product companies that sell services, enterprise support, consultancy, development. Aquia also does some development on the side. So these are product companies selling services. So this is a bit mixed in the community. Why would we sell products? I think in the end it comes down to being more happy and that's for five things that we will make more happy. So I will go over them one at a time later but I think we can make the users of our software happier. I think we can make our clients happier. Our developers, our teams, our coworkers, our companies and in the end Drupal as an ecosystem. Happy users. So our users nowadays look at WhatsApp, they look at Facebook, they look at Google Docs, things work so well. Like really well, they're really thought out, works all the time, it's stable and they expect our software to have the same experience. And you know when you show sometimes and you think it's really great and clients are like, yeah, not that great. Or when you help Dries talk about things like media, like we need to get this stuff in. People expect these things. Try to explain blocks to a user who has never been in a Drupal community before. It's a crime and I do this a lot. Quality, you know, we don't want bugs as end users. Just want things to work, look good. We want things to be sliding. We want things to be drag and dropped. We want great design. So this is the end users who use our software. They're expecting us to get better and we need to get better. We need to be up to the level with Facebook and WhatsApp, et cetera, because that's the new standard. Apple does it really great as well. Our clients expect better out of the box experience. We've all had this question as an agency, like, oh, but you probably have something on the shelf, right? That does this straight away. Yeah, sometimes, but most of the time not. So we have to rebuild and they expect us to build it fast. They expect support. Why isn't this module supported? Why isn't this module available for Drupal 8 yet? And they want this cheap. And this is a big thing. They don't want to pay for our research and development. They don't want to give you five days to work on a feature. They'll give you one day. But you, as a developer who wants to make really cool software, want one day for checking out what other communities do, two days for writing your code, one day for testing, fifth day for writing automated tests, maybe contributing this back to the community. But what happens in practice? You have one day and you have to take two hours to do all of that and it's a shame. We want happy developers. I think there's a lot of talk about making on this Drupal con about creating happy teams, preventing burnouts, remote teams, trying to make the life of developers happy. And most of you are here, are developers. So you want to get paid to work on Core. You want to get paid to work on your modules, to work on distributions. I think that the time where we expected developers to work in the weekends, to work at night, to fix stuff, to contribute, it could have been done when Drupal was really small and when it was easy to contribute. But it's getting really hard to get your stuff in Core. It's getting hard to get your module up to a level where clients love it. And you cannot do this anymore in your free time. And as a company owner, I don't think I should ask my staff to do this in their free time. So they should get paid for it and there should be enough time for them to do this. We want better planning for the team. So no more crazy deadlines. You have to finish this, the eight points you have to deliver by the end of the day. No crazy weekend sessions. It's hard. Developing is really hard. There's no media developer. You have to get it right every time. You make a mistake, the site goes down. So developers are hard and we should take care of the guys much better. Focus on larger tasks instead of running all over the place. It's really what our developers like. Okay, you have one day to work on this feature. You have one week to work on this feature. You have one month to work on this component. Instead of, okay, you have to do, work on five projects today because you need to fix issues on the sites of five clients. And they want more time to make really cool software. I think most of our developers, they don't stay with GoGrayla because we pay them so much. They stay with us because we do really cool projects and they love that and that's what they wanna work on. So you want happy developers. For me, this is super important. And yes, we want happy companies as well. I mean, we cannot survive if we don't make money, we're, you know, capitalistic system. So we want recurring income from happier clients that stay along with you. That's why we love the support contracts, right? Oh, I signed a hosting contract. Oh, I signed a support contract. It's nice because you can build a stable business on that. You want higher margins, you know, sometimes I see companies operate at 10% margin. They have a bad year. They have a project run over, you make a loss. It's really painful and we see companies that get burned and fall over. You wanna grow your market. We're based in Holland, so we always need to get out. But we need to grow our markets. You want to be less dependent on the big client. We've been there. 60, 70% of our turnover for one client. If that client leaves, you have a big issue. So you need to diversify for who you're working for. And you wanna do more marketing. So for us, marketing is always something that, yeah, who's gonna pay for this? Which budget does it come from? And it's a struggle. And I think productization has helped with all of this. And if we can do all this, the Drupal ecosystem will also benefit. You know, we can make higher quality software. We can innovate faster. And innovation for me is an issue in Drupal right now. So even when we look at innovations that's going on right now, Big Pipe, for example, it, you know, we didn't invent Big Pipe. It came from Facebook, which is a commercial enterprise. Refreshless, also really cool. I'm very excited about these things, but we didn't invent that. If you look at the top modules in Drupal, like it has been years since a new module has come up. I think paragraphs is doing really well, but it's not much that's happening. And we have thousands of modules. Good job. Porting Drupal 7 modules, it's, you know, we are doing well, but we need Acre at the moment to step in and Drupal Association to pay people to port their modules. This is not healthy. A lot of 80% of the modules are not ported yet. They're not used as much as the top modules, but still, this is an issue. So help these initiatives. What we said on the first day during this keynote, I was very excited about it. I think everybody is excited about this. We want these features. Everybody has been asked by clients to move blocks around to make an easy system. We need to work on this. But how long is it gonna take us to do these innovations? I was at the session afterwards and they said, well, you know, it's nice that Drees made these pictures and the user interface, but it's realized that it's gonna take us at least a year, probably two years, before the stuff gets in. And looking at our competitors, where are they then? They're going fast. And we need to have a happy community of developers. So I'm talking about the issues a little bit. I don't wanna talk about the issues too much today because it's very negative and I'm super excited about Drupal, super excited about Drupal 8. Very cool things we're doing as a company and as a Dutch Drupal community as well. But we need to look at this. So it took us five years to build Drupal 8. This is, this hurted us and we cannot do this again. Like for Drupal 9, we know how to fix certain parts of it, but issues like developers not having enough time, developers leaving their job, you know, it's not sustainable. Again, Acre and the Drupal, they pick up the tab. It's great that Acre is doing this. They got $500,000 invested to port Drupal 7 modules to Drupal 8. But we cannot keep on asking Acre to do this. I mean, it's a sign that this community is not healthy when a new version comes out, almost all modules should be ported straight away. And if developers cannot do this, or if they don't have an incentive to do this, or not the time, then we have an issue and we need to talk about it. We have a huge long tail of unused and unknown modules. So when I look at innovation, you know, you need to look at the volumes because innovation doesn't come from a few places. We need to innovate in the whole long tail of these thousands of modules that we have. But most modules have like a few hundred installations and you've never heard of them. They don't have the money to fly here. They don't have the money to promote their module. They cannot do the updates. So if we want to innovate faster, we need to look at this long tail of modules that currently are not being used that much. And that's a shame. I'll talk a bit later about the distributions, but at the moment they're not sustainable. Commons is not the end of life. Acre is not continuing Commons. Commerce has its own issues at the moment. And then we look at other distributions that have a few hundred installs, which is not enough to bring a lot of bread on the plate, as we say in Holland. So we need to look at distributions. How can we make them sustainable? We haven't really got over this yet. Looking at Drupal.org, there's 150,000 open issues. So if you look at your support department in your company, how many issues are open for years? None, right? Cannot afford this. Nobody wants to let their clients leaving with a bug or an issue. At least it should be closed or updated. But at the moment we have 150,000 open issue and 60,000 open bugs. So the support we're giving to these people who are asking for it, they either not doesn't get resolved or we're working on it, but it's a small percentage. Or it's fixed, but they don't hear about it. And we're losing a lot of people in our community because they don't get answers on their questions. And it's a shame. So commercial company will not have hundreds of thousands of open issues. So we can do better. And what I'm saying is that when I talk about this issue, it's not because I want to get rich or anything. So this is what people think the motivation is behind selling modules and selling projects. Number one reason is he wants to get rich. I look at Drupal and I love Drupal, but I see pain in the community. I see pain with our clients. I see pain with the end users. I see pain with the developers. And this is how this results in long periods of development. Modules that are not ported. Some guy makes a really cool module, but he doesn't know how to market it. He cannot sustain this. Distributions who are not being ported to Drupal aid right now. A lot of open issues. So we need to work on that. And innovations are too rare because of that. And yeah, in the end, some developers have to work for free. And this is, I mean, obviously it's great if people do this and we should support them. The time where it was a hobby project, Drupal, that has been long gone. Our community has changed. It's much harder to get something in core right now than it was a few years ago. It's much harder to get a module up to a world-class standard than it was a few years ago. Just look at the Drupal cons. You mean that they're organized professionally. I think there's three or four people on the Drupal association team to do this full time. They get paid for it. In Holland, we still do the Drupal gems as a volunteers. And it's insane. So we set to ourselves as well. We cannot continue doing this in our free time. We need to professionalize and get paid also to organize these huge events. So looking at the products that are in the Drupal community right now, we've already seen that hosting, maintenance supports, I think they're products. They're being sold, audits and trainings, semi. They can be products because your margins are high. You can sell them over and over again. You know, it's work you've done in the past. So for me, they're semi products. Teams, super interesting, but out of scope for this talk. So I'm not talking about selling teams, although it's very interesting because teams actually don't fall on the GPL. Not sure people realize this and this is because CSS, for example, and Twig, Twig is being discussed right now in Drupal.org, that doesn't fall on the GPL. So it means you can actually sell teams and it doesn't have to fall on the GPL. But you cannot sell modules or distros. All right, so selling modules and later selling distros. Actually, you cannot sell modules because everything we do has to fall on the GPL. Drupal modules and teams are a derivative work of Drupal. Actually, for teams, it's not true. If you distribute or sell, selling is distributing, you must do so under the terms of GPL. Jam, real quick. Yes, that's true. So what this says is you can sell a module but you have to do it on the GPL and anybody can then put it on Drupal.org for free. The fact that people are buying thousands of modules on this marketplace that I showed earlier says something about that this has not always been done. I mean, otherwise, it would have been on Drupal.org. Why is it not being done? Because the guy is maintaining it, updating it. These are pretty cool, complex modules. He is maintaining them. So people are not putting them on Drupal.org, why? Because then they have to maintain it and don't wanna do this. So under GPL, you have to make your module or your distribution again available on the GPL. And we do. So all of the things we do at CodeGrader for Yoast, all of the things we do at OpenSocial, we make OpenSource available on the GPL. And this is super important to understand. Anybody thinks that the discussion is closed now is wrong. It means we do make our code OpenSource but we can still sell modules. I'll talk about Yoast a little bit. Everything Yoast does is GPL. It's all in GitHub and still he sells modules. So it is possible and it's still open. This is not possible. License, free for your personal project. This is a like module for Drupal 8. And it's on GitHub. You cannot say it's free for your personal project. I mean, it falls on the GPL so it's free and you can do whatever you want with it. So this is something that's not working. Here, this is also in VATO Market, Drupal Dragon Drop Builder, 28 bucks. Then it is a regular license and you have an extended license. This is also weird. Like, okay, you can buy it for one site but then you have to buy it for more sites. No, it's GPL so you buy it maybe one time then you can use it and do whatever you want with it. And VATO is saying, I check that they have a split license. They completely made this up. They have a split license. So it's open source but the CSS in this project is closed source. So I don't know what that means and by the looks of it it doesn't do so much CSS anyway because it has the Drupal defaults. So that's how they try to get around with it. But we need to have this discussion because if we don't have this discussion now maybe we don't want to Drupal Marketplace, that's fine but they will have this Marketplace and people are buying modules and these companies are growing, getting richer and we don't really know how to deal with them. So we need to talk about it. Robert Douglas said something about this. Yes, GPL closes the levels of the debate. You cannot charge money for transferring the software. It has to be GPL. Doesn't say that developers have to work for free that we cannot charge money for our software. So how do we then charge money for the software? Well, one way is to look at the web service loophole and Drupal address wrote about this already in 2006. And that means that basically you cannot charge money for the software, but you can charge money for services you sell on top of this software. And he's been doing this successfully with Acreab but also with Molem for example. So yes, there's free, but you want a high availability SLA. You want priority customer support then you'll start paying for this. And Molem is really, really well built and doing really well. Another example is from the WordPress community and let's talk a little bit more about that. Do you guys know Yoast SEO? Hence, some of you. It's a top five WordPress module. I should say plug-in. I'm saying module at any time. That's how much I'm into Drupal. 28 million downloads, that's insane. Five, more than five million active installation that is more plugin installations than there are Drupal websites in the world. They do this with their plug-in. This is an insane amount of people. Yoast Devok, he's a fellow Dutchman, founded his company in 2010. By himself, he was alone. Now he has a staff of 30 people. Half of them are developers. So that means that 15 guys are working on this module. Can you imagine that? The whole company evolves around this module. There's no module in Drupal that does this, so that we can even get close. Yes, there's a lot of work being done on views, on CTLs, whatever, but it's always on the side next to other work, but there's no company around these modules, a level of 15. They have a free and a premium plug-in. This is how they can do it. I mean, if Yoast didn't have a premium plug-in, he would still be this one guy having like average module, but not on the level that it's now, because they have actually an income model, and of this five million users, a lot of them are buying the premium module. So we'll not say how much today, but you can imagine that from five million active users, even a small percentage of that buying the premium module is a big income. So they invest in research. Yoast doesn't just make the module. He goes to the SEO conferences. He goes speaking everywhere. They do a lot of research in, like they even work together with Google making this plug-in better. They work with hosting companies to make this plug-in faster. The usability is great. They have designers, they have usability experts, they hire accessibility experts to help them with the module. So all of this work they are doing from the income from the premium module is making this module really good. Actually, it's making WordPress really good. Every time that somebody says that WordPress is better with SEO than Drupal, that's because of Yoast. And it's top five module that runs on most of the WordPress plugins. And we are getting our ass kicked in Drupal because people think that Drupal is not doing well in SEO, which is actually not true. Drupal can be really good in SEO, but we don't have this plug-in, we don't have this module that makes it super easy to install and set this up. And the knowledge of SEO in our developer community is too low. That's why this module is making the WordPress community really strong and it's actually making the web better because five million websites making really good content, writing very easy to understand content, is helping the web making a better place. And I really like that. So we were very lucky that Yoast allowed us to port this module to Drupal. And we have the module available in Drupal 7 and in Drupal 8, and you can download it. And that's great. But to do this, we have to invest in a Drupal 7 version. We have to invest in a Drupal 8 version. We have to do support, we have to submit patches. And we have to keep up with Yoast because there's 15 developers are changing their code and innovating super fast. And this is a big problem as you will see soon. So making a module like this, it costs us about $40,000. It's normal. If you want to build a good module, you want to promote it, you want to do something with it, make it good, you want to make a Drupal 8 version. Well, okay, it's a big deal. It's like $40,000. This is a lot of money for most small Drupal agencies. So if we didn't invest this money, this module would not be here and Drupal would be worse. So that's a lot of money and we cannot just invest this and say, well, no, that's nice. We need to do something with that. So I did some research into the usage of Drupal modules and I checked out how much modules are being used and what are the top modules being used. And I got this graph. So this is pretty crazy graph. It says that there's a very small percentage of modules that are being used a lot, but most modules are used very little. And it's very sad if you're in this long tail, but most modules are there. So every time we're so proud of, we have 10,000 modules, we have 30,000 modules in a Drupal community. Yes, it's true, but most of them are there. And for me, really, when I look at that, it says the top two modules, this is the big spike that goes all the way up. That's like the top 2%. There's about 200 modules that have 30,000 or more installs. They're doing really well. We don't have to worry about them. They're doing fine. Most of them are already in Drupal 8. I think out of this 200 modules, there's like 30, not in Drupal 8, so they're doing really well. But what about the slower 98%, which is like the normal people, the smaller agencies, even expanding Drupal into India, into China, these are the agencies who are making these modules, and maybe they're really good and great, and they can help us. But right now, all the talent, all that energy, all that dreams are in this long tail, and they're not being used. There. So, when I look at modules and think about them, I really ask myself a question, okay, can a module reach a critical mass? Critical mass, what does it mean even in Drupal? It's okay, this module is being used so much that I can talk about it on the DrupalCon, giving me personal status, maybe some new clients. Can I promote it through the project page, get some leads to my organization? Like how much people are gonna use my module, and how much people do I need to make this module work well and sustainable for the future? Can the maintenance keep up with demand? Like you've seen the issue queue. People post issues, can we fix them, or will they be left there? And this is also an issue, because many modules are not up to quality yet. I'm trying to do a research, how much percentage of the modules currently have testing coverage. I don't have the data yet, but I really wanna see and see something about the quality of the modules. My idea is that there's also a few percent of the modules have really good quality in testing coverage, but the large percentage of the modules don't have it. And that can lead to security issues and hurt Drupal. So do they have enough time to make this quality? Do they have enough time to port the modules? Can they innovate? Can they do research? And are we building a sustainable ecosystem with the modules? And I think we have to do better. You know, this is great. We should all be very thankful to Acrea for having the accelerating Drupal 8 adoption plan. They invested $500,000 in this. But this is a sign that something is wrong. We should not need this as a community. Why aren't people updating their modules? If they would have been fine, we wouldn't need this. And it's great Acrea's doing it, but we cannot keep on asking them to fix our problems. And what if they stop doing this? Then it will hurt us. Dries blocked about this. This is his survey. He was talking about this in his keynote. So what is the main reasons for people not using Drupal 8? And 60% way above the rest is we're waiting for certain modules or teams to be ported. So actually the current status is holding Drupal back. Maybe they're not right. You know, there's a lot of modules that are not needed anymore in Drupal 8, but still people are waiting for them. So Dries talked about this as well in his 2014 keynote in Amsterdam. And he sees the problem. He wants to fix it. He wants to make sure that more developers contribute. And he wants to do something with privileged groups. So we now all notice when you contribute, you get points and then you come up with in this marketplace. But who benefits from these privileges? Like I think they are gonna benefit from the privileges. So these are already privileged companies and privileged developers who have the time and the status and the income to work on their super cool super modules. But it's not gonna benefit a small guy because he does not have the time yet to do the commitments. And we keep on increasing here, therefore the privileged guys and the guys who don't have all this luxury and they don't have the time, yeah, they're getting less privileged. It says it in the name privilege. So this is what Yoos does at the moment. He charges $69 a year for upgrades in supports of the premium module. You do get some features in there like multiple keyword focus, some redirect manager. They are on GPL, like they're not a WordPress module, but you could get them from GPL. It's open source, it falls on a GPL. It's just not bundled in the premium module and you don't get support. So it's 69 if you wanna have more sites, it gets a bit more expensive. This is what they do. This is how they sell the premium plugins. So how can we do this for Drupal? Because that's when a few months when I handed in my session what I wanted to do. There's actually update of Yoast right now that shows you how your page is gonna look like on Facebook, shows you how your page is gonna look like on Twitter. It has accessibility guidelines and you can do multiple keywords, et cetera. So are we gonna make this premium module for Drupal? And the answer is no, we're not gonna do it. Why? Because we cannot keep up with the innovations. So we invested this money already, the module is out there, but the premium module needs to have all the premium features. And remember, they have 15 developers working on the WordPress module. So for us to port these features back into Drupal, it's crazy. We cannot even do this without the premium module and we cannot get the premium module out without these features. So even we have a problem that we cannot get this up and running. And who's hurting it? Drupal, because WordPress has all these cool features. Like how does your post look like on Facebook? This is really cool, people want this. Accessibility, there's many sessions about this. Super important, we don't have it. So even for us saying we're gonna do the premium module, we can't get it up and running because they're innovating so fast right now. And this is gonna hurt us because there's a lot more Drupal plugins who are doing this. Okay, enough about the modules. Maybe this shows then, because we think that's easier. Dries predicted in 2006 that he would see a tsunami of hosted service modules on Drupal distributions. We haven't seen them, have we? I mean, what's the most popular commerce? Commerce is the most kickstart, it's the most popular, but it's not a hosted solution. 2010, Dries said we won't be able successfully with the commercial vendors if we don't have distributions. But we have to make them sustainable. In 2016, a few months ago, Dries again stretched, you know, I really like distributions. And when I talked to him yesterday, he again said, I love distributions. So are we making them right now and are we making them sustainable? So Thunder is the most used Drupal 8 module at the moment. The core expenses of Thunder are made by Berdamedia. There's no plan to earn money. Well, great, you think, right? What about the future? Well, if Thunder is successful, we might change the funding to a foundation model like Apache. So it might, right? Or they might not, jam. Yeah, yeah. So for me, this is not sustainable because if they decided to do something else or if it doesn't work out, they will kill the distribution. So I don't think it's a sustainable business at itself. We've seen this before, right? With Drupal Commons. So it's all launched, it's all good. We're gonna compete with Jive and Gemma, very excited. Gonna run on the Acrea Cloud. We get our best people to make the new version. We release it, then in 2014, Gartner says, hmm, yeah. It's not keeping up with innovations. Why? Because it's a side project. You know, it's not the main project. Like Thunder is not the main project of Berda. They're not making money with this. There's no dedicated team on it. In 2015, the main leader developers stepped down. And in 2016, when you search for most Drupal Commons pages, you get 404s on the Acrea site. So talking about sustainability. And again, when we look at the distributions, most distributions are in the long tail. This is just the top 17. There's more distributions, but I haven't checked out because it's, I know, I didn't make my scraper for this. There's one module doing really well, Commerce Kickstarter. They were supposed to launch their distribution at the DrupalCon, you know? Because of circumstances, they didn't make it. And the circumstances were, there was a product company, platform, who interfered with that, you know? So it's already happening in our community. There's already products, it's already messing with us. And the fact, you know, they're doing great. I'm talking to Ryan. They are gonna launch, it's gonna look really cool. But it's hard for them, why? Because again, they don't have the sustainable module around it, and it fails. And now they have to, you know, get everything with four guys up and running again. And this is hurting us because, as I've shown before, this is our largest module. And, oh, so this is the largest distribution. So if we think we can compete with Magento, for example, because, you know, Drupal Commerce is great, but then we need to get this release out and we need to get it faster out. And Drupal 8 was launched last year. So every time, every day we wait for this, our clients are always asking us, when will Drupal 8 Commerce be out? And so it's hurting us. And of course, I ask everybody to contribute to the project, but it's important for us. But we need to get better at this as well. So we are launching our distribution. Next to the Yoast module, this is the thing we contribute mostly back to Drupal. For those of you who haven't heard about it, we want to replace Drupal Commons with a Drupal 8 version. So that means you can use it for your social intranets. It means you can use it for your volunteer communities. Greenpeace is a longtime client of us. They, we just launched the version three of their platform. That's a Drupal 7 platform. But we've done tons of research and design and all of that is in our distribution. So this is gonna cost a lot of money. How did we do this? Well, actually we sold 10% of our shares of our company. Me and my business partner was here. So we did a crowdfunding campaign. We raised over $200,000 for this. We have 150 investors. We added the same amount as money as ourselves because it will take you half a million to build a good distribution. So if we did not do any commercialization, if we do not do any productization, we can never earn this money back. It will be on Drupal.org. In June, we will launch it on Drupal.org. It will be on the GPL. It will be open source. Everything we'll do will be available for you guys. Actually it's already open source. Everything we do is open. So check it out. But we will do an open source version next to it. Why? Because we need to get this investment back and we need to create a sustainable model around this distribution, which most of us haven't done before. So you get your SaaS, you get your updates, you get your support, et cetera. And doing so, we will be able to make a sustainable business. We can invest in innovating. We need to get features out every sprint. Cannot have a maintenance team on it. We need to get designers involved. We need to get developers involved. We need to pay our developers well. We need to get the smartest guys globally to work on our project. We need to do more research and development. There's the YUMLA social community. They say they have 160,000 installs. 160,000. Common says 2,000. This is crazy. And it's pushing YUMLA forward. They're doing core patches, et cetera. We need to get the distribution open on the GPL. It's good practice. And we have to, because we're building on the GPL. And in the end, yes, we need to make money. And we need to pay back all these guys who invested in the distribution. So we need to sell the distribution. We will launch it on the DrupalCon. I should say the Drupal Dev Days in Milan. If any of you are joining, I think Taras is joining. That's good. We will get the module out. It will be open source, and you guys can all use it. So before questions, what did we learn today? Products are already here. Like we can say, we don't want products. They're already here. They're here to stay. They're not going to go anywhere. They're funding a lot of our community. So we need to find a way to deal with them. They can be beneficial to Drupal. They can spur innovation. They can attract new developers. They can attract new companies. And they're going to be really good for our ecosystem. We have GPL. GPL is fine. There's nothing wrong with GPL per se. It helps to keep us, our community open, free, and available for everyone. So everybody who is worried that somehow we're going to block parts of Drupal, or we're going to destroy the ecosystem, that's not the case. And people should not worry about it. So helpfully, that will help them to open their mind to the productization that's happening in Drupal. And what does give us the benefits of that? We can go hand in hand with GPL. We have the service loophole. We can start selling modules. People are selling modules. And I think that Drupal 8 will give a lot of boost to these new modules. We see the questions that are being raised for Drupal 8 increase. People want richer media. They want connected services. So there will be new business models. The distribution model, we're going to try. We'll write a lot about it. I think it can work really well for Drupal 8. So I think we'll see a lot of new business models. And I think we should open up as a community. Decide what is wrong. Decide what is right. And have a good debate about this. And I hope today I opened up many minds of people to start thinking about this. And not shout when they hear, oh, we're going to sell products. We're going to sell distributions. And say, oh, you're evil. You're going to destroy Drupal. And boo, get away with you. You know, we love Drupal. Everything we own is in Drupal. I'm a very fierce evangelist of open source. But I also think we can do better. We can do better for the clients. We can do better for our end users, for our staff, for the developers, and as companies. We can do a very healthy business in this. Make a nice margin. Get a sustainable company. It's important as well. OK, so let's discuss. Yeah, the red shirt. So the business model for social distribution is the question. It will be open SaaS. So people can pay a fee every month to run the platform. So we'll host it for them. We will do the updates. They'll get all the new features. And they can use our support. So that's the business model for open social. Yeah, next to the version on Drupal. It's the same version, except some people don't want to go through the hassle of going to a company, hiring a Drupal agency, sign this contract, et cetera. So it will be a basic version. If you want more complex stuff, then they should go to you guys. And you guys can do all the integrations and the edge cases, et cetera. Yeah, Matthew. Hey, I was just ahead of disclaimer that I wrote a long blog post that was critical of a lot of these ideas. Yeah, you guys should read it. Dries read it as well. He didn't agree with everything. I'm sure he did. But I will also say that we were on a podcast together. And we ended up agreeing on realizing there's lots of areas where we agree. I just had a question about, in a specific idea came to my mind while I was listening to you, is some of the modules and the distributions that you've talked about would use a module, such as a meditative module. And that module is maintained by my friend and colleague at all about Dave Reed, who maintains 134 modules. I think he said yesterday, because he's insane. But no, he's not insane. No, he's great. He's great, yeah. The thing is, Dave, like a lot of us, is not motivated primarily by price or by making money. And he's more motivated by the community and by giving back to free software and putting his modules on triple.org and not selling them. So I was just curious if you think that if there's a paid module that uses Meditech, should they also pay people like Dave? Or is Dave, is that sort of, as a person like Dave, maybe not quite right for the Drupal community if they aren't primarily motivated by price? And I'm asking this seriously, like, how do we, how do we, in your formulation of this idea of selling modules, pay for all of the work that's done, that all of the other work that you use, and so. Yeah, so that's a good question. And we've been talking about this in the podcast a bit further. You know, there's this risk of siloing that the WordPress community sees a little bit. In my mind, if things fall on the GPL, we have to give it back on GPL. And the service loophole is basically the only way around that. So for me, it's very simple. If you're gonna use somebody else module in that, which we basically all modules do and we have all these libraries, et cetera, so you should give it back on the GPL. And your module, that's why I'm saying, you know, selling modules, selling the actual code is actually not possible in the GPL. So you can only, in my view, use the service loophole and build some stuff on top of that. But yeah, if somebody gives his code to the community, you build something on top of that, you fall on the GPL. And if you don't build something on Drupal or on the work of somebody else, that's actually the only exclusion you can do of making your work under and under other license. So I think the answer is everything will fall on the GPL. And it's like this guy who built a link-like module, which is a great module, saying it's for personal use only. We should, you know, speak to him about this. He's in Vietnam, I don't think we can sue him, but, you know, we can actually, we can speak to him and we should. So I have a comment and a follow-on from you, Matthew. The first thing is that, I don't think we're talking about selling code in any cases. There are a lot of cases where, well, Dries hired me in 2008 to work for Acquia, and he explained to me, there are lots of us who have time and no budget, and that's why open source is great, because we can put together whatever we need. But we're gonna aim to find clients who have plenty of money and no time, and they're willing to pay for this stuff in one form or another. They don't care to implement it. So like that, a lot of us live from that, right? And this idea of selling code, we're often, actually, we're talking about putting together open source code and then activating it with an API key, or taking open source code and hosting it somewhere, and in your case, still sharing it with the rest of us to benefit if we wanna put it together ourselves. There are Drupal distributions. There's a big Drupal 8 distribution that is effectively not open source, right? And they're very canny and they're very clever about that. But Np8, I think, or... So Np8 is completely Drupal, and you can only get it by paying, I forget if it's 180,000 or 400,000 euros. In that range, yeah. To use it. I think it's at 400,000 euros. It's not a great distribution. Yes. It's awesome. But it's effectively not open source. So if we're talking on an ethical level about right and wrong and Oversource, we could bring that into discussion. However, my follow on from your point, Matthew, I think it's disingenuous to say Dave Reed does this from the goodness of his heart. I mean, Dave's a great guy and contributes way more than any of us, or many of us. But he is making his living from Drupal. He does work for a Drupal service provider. And every time that Lullabot builds a website and pays his paycheck, right, actually he's benefiting from that. So it's one or two levels removed. But we are all scratching our own itches when we write code because we can be idealistic because we want, but if we don't have a roof over our heads, it's really already hard to maintain that. And so the idea that, for example, that Robert Douglas has been talking about for at least five years, is removing one layer of abstraction and saying, and I can almost quote Rob on this directly by saying if there are people in the world that I want to be successful millionaires, they are my friends in the Drupal community, can't we figure out how to support ourselves better? And the idea is always, and what Taco is experimenting with and what other people keep trying to do is, how can we, for example, take something and work on it constantly and make it better and better and better by getting paid for it directly instead of hoping that we get through the projects five times a year. So I don't know, there were no easy answers. No, I don't have the golden solution here, but my point is by stating the question and getting so much response, pretty nasty, it's like the worst presentation I'm ever giving because nobody's gonna clap for me, everybody's gonna throw stuff at me. I had the Ukrainian guys say, okay, if things get really hot, come up and protect me, but your guys are really nice, so thanks for that. But it's a difficult topic and we should not demonize each other saying, oh, this guy's here to destroy Drupal. I mean, I'm sure the guys out who want to destroy Drupal, it's not me, I want to get better software, get better paid and innovate fast. Why, because I love Drupal and I want to see it succeed and I want to see Magento grow and I want to see WordPress go fast. I want Drupal to be the coolest and the best CMS out there. Yeah. I just wanted to comment on what makes sense to release because I think the whole, so, well, let me introduce myself. Yeah. I'm Ronald and my company, RumiFi, has an open source solutions for the accommodations industry and we sell our distro. It's called RumiFi for accommodations and you can go to our site and you pay us money and you download it. Name the site, name the site. RumiFi.us. And the reason we did that, it was actually open source. It was on GitHub and all of that. A different version and then we kind of rebuilt it and we decided we're going to sell it and we decided we're going to, what we think we sell is access to us. It's support and it's obviously GPL. I mean, you can go, you can buy it and then you can repost it. It's not, you can resell it, do what you like. It's actually the module we had originally built called rooms. There are several themes on that side. You showed cold canyon or whatever that sell Drupal distributions essentially with our module and they probably made more money than us. But anyway, besides that, I think there's an interesting distinction about what it makes sense to sell and not. And for me, that distinction is what's the level of problem you're solving. So for example, if it's the meta tag module, it's a generic issue. It's kind of dealing with meta tags in general. And I think that benefits the community if it's open source. And it's the same issue for us. We solve bookings. So our library that solves the booking issue and the Drupal module that solves the booking issue for any booking scenario. Those are on Drupal.org and I think that's where they belong and we're not trying to sell them. RumiFy for accommodations, which is very specifically, if you're literally renting out your vacation rental or your hotel or you're trying to build like an Airbnb clone, we sell that because we're selling it to businesses that need the type of support and continuation to build their own business. You're not trying to solve some generic booking problem. So I think there is a distinction that can be made there just to justify it to yourself. The general comment I think is the Drupal community should really like chill out about this and let people do things and we don't have to discuss ethics when it comes to selling modules. It's like really overreaching about what ethics means. We have to really tone it down. Companies are charging like 300 and $400 an hour for access to talk to someone. You know, I can discuss the ethics of that. Do you really think you're worth that much money? It's so let's just chill out about that. Yeah, besides if Acre have to start, yeah. Sort themselves out. And we let Acre have, you know, pay for the big pipe integration. Everybody loves it. You know, there's nobody stands up and says, well, but Facebook is selling our data. So we should not use that technology and we should not let Acre have because their products company developed this module. Now we love it. So, you know, cannot have it both, both. Yeah. I was gonna mention, Rufai, just going back to like your list of top modules and thinking about some of those that are in there and often I think a lot of the modules, there's a secondary way that we're paying for them. So some of them that the top one is Mailchimp is a module that's not sold as the module, but you can't use the Mailchimp module without buying the Mailchimp service. Yeah. And that's Mailchimp have put a huge amount of money into making sure that module works and they've contributed effectively improvements to other parts. Yeah, and they sponsored the conference as well. And coming from working in Ripple commerce, they're saying that there's been a lot of funding into module improvements through modules coming in. So there isn't an authorized, people don't pick Ripple commerce because it's an authorized.net module. They pick Ripple commerce and then look at what payment gateway modules are. So the payment gateway companies know that they're not gonna get the businesses coming into Ripple commerce unless they have a gateway module there. So that's a funding group that comes in and that benefits and delivers more modules. So I think there's a secondary question which I thought with some extent is in the host as well about the service that you get on top of the module to do an open source module. Yeah. It gets you into an ecosystem that's wider than just the module itself. Yeah, yeah. I think we're about to end this session. I have two more slides to show you. Sprints, tomorrow, go there. We need your help. We need your contributions. And you can rate the session. If you go to the presentation, click the link or just go to the events.drupal.org page. If you wanna follow us, we'll be sharing all our information about this exciting journey that we're on. Check me out on Twitter, Taco Potser, the agency, Golgorilla. Our distribution on OpenSocial and Yoast module on Yoast. Thank you. Thank you.