 Good afternoon everybody my name is Robert Douglas from aquia, and I'm here today to talk to you about taking inventory of Drupal products, and It was originally titled app stores, but I'd like to redact the title of my session and make it market places it's part of the Shift in concepts that I'd like to convey today So it's been quite a week if I may say so in terms of Announcements and press releases and blog posts. I don't know if everybody's been following along closely But here are some of the titles we've seen recently So sub hub launches world's first Drupal powered app store certainly Written to raise a couple eyebrows and catch people's attention, which it did aquia unveils apps market for Drupal The open app standard better usability Drupal wide open app standard. I wasn't that an interesting concept so a lot's happened in the in the Past couple weeks, but actually things got started quite a while ago in terms of thinking about market places App stores and whatnot so before we get into What all of those announcements mean and What it means to have an open apps standard and before I invite some guests to share the stage with me from Phase two and sub hub and from aquia to explain some of these press releases and announcements. I want to go through a little bit of history Probably most of you saw some or all of it But just to give the rest of the whole conversation a little bit of context Around what we're talking about when we're talking market places Why some of that might be important and how that might fit into your lives on a day-to-day basis as Drupal developers business owners Drupal users etc So last year at some point I had a conversation a topic that I presented in Brussels at The dev days and I called it announcing the Drupal app store And I used the hashtag Drupal app store and what I what I learned was that? That was a topic that a lot of people were quite interested in in fact have several of them had Somewhat strong reactions to it emotionally It's fair to say that at one point it felt like it was going to unleash a worldwide Viking invasion and they were going to burn down cities Some people even went as far as to say That you know the Drupal wars were starting so I appreciated this graphic unfortunately I didn't trace the credit on this one So it's uncredited, but I think it's quite a great graphic so, you know a Little bit of a rabble razor rabble rouser here it was Slightly intentional that it was inflammatory, but the the whole thing started as a thought challenge for us to think as a community What does it mean to have an app store? Is it something we want and what it would look like and I think it actually after people got over the emotions that we've risen to the challenge quite splendidly? In sense, then I've had the chance to talk about it in many Contexts many Drupal camps a Drupal con In Chicago where Jeff Walpole and I Shared the stage where he announced that phase two was actually launching An applications marketplace an app marketplace in the context of their distributions open public and whatnot So let me share with you some of the concepts that I've developed around this as I've talked about it in many places So that when we get around at the end of the Session to talking about the open apps standard and what three different companies are doing about it and with it That you have some context how how the thinking goes and and why it it's important So backing way up and if somebody we've seen these slides before we're going through them fairly quickly There there's a type of business that you can run where you essentially buy a product And you put it on your shelves and when somebody wants that you sell it to them for more money than you bought it It's a very good business model. I can highly recommend it Doesn't work very well with GPL code where you buy the code for zero, but These are called resellers you basically take a product. You don't alter it in any way you resell it for more than you bought it There's a variation on that called a value added reseller where you take a product like a bunch of cut flowers You put them into a bouquet put a nice little ribbon on it maybe a wedding card or a funeral card or a birthday card on it and You sell that so you've added value to the actual products You've added aesthetic you've packaged them in a certain way and that's called a value added reseller You can apply these terms to the software industry as well People take a product wrap it around in services Maybe combine products together sell that their value added resellers to and in fact in my view Most of what people do with Drupal these days and especially historically because things are starting to change is Act as a value adder reseller you take a software product Drupal you combine it with some things that you download from the internet such as modules maybe themes you customize those Maybe you write some more modules you make a theme you add value to it And then you resell it and the customer that you're selling to is what we typically know as a client it's somebody who wants a website and typically historically and Still probably the master vast majority of people's business these days is being a value added reseller to people who want web sites this is fine and By no means what I encourage people to stop doing that if that's what they're good at and they're making a good business And we definitely need people to do that going on in the future. So and by no means or ways Am I encouraging people that that's a bad thing? It's a good thing However, it does differ from the business model of having a product something that's self-contained something that you can Put on the proverbial shelf somebody walks in and gets the product. They know the product. They know what it is They know what they're getting you can define it. It's a whole thing in it of itself They buy the product and use it now the the good thing about a product like a can of coke Is that when you want a can of coke on a hot day? Nobody has to get out of bag of sugar add water and some brown syrup put it in a tin can and hand it to you It's there. It's ready. It's done You know what it is They've provided it and they can sell that can of coke over and over and over again because they've got factories producing them out in the millions So the same is true with software products I'm you can think of a million examples Microsoft Word made a couple people really rich Along the way because it was a product that you could just Duplicate at zero next to zero cost and sell over and over and over again. So software products have a very Valuable place in any software ecosystem. I Think they have a valuable place in the ecosystem Drupal as well, which is why I started talking about it to begin with But my interests in the matter Actually have to do with these people here now I'm of the opinion that if you possess a development team like that You can write any software you want and it's going to be innovative and great and It's going to be the best software on earth, right? That is the best development team ever assembled Why wouldn't we be the most innovative product on the earth software wise? Why do we have any problem with velocity? Why can't we get modules upgraded? Why can't we get Drupal releases done faster? I mean there are all these complaints about the velocity of Drupal It is what it is. We've got good velocity Obviously, we're doing well in a lot of markets and we're keeping up with the innovation trend more or less But I believe we could get more out of this development team I think that if we managed them a little bit differently Then we'd probably have better products better Drupal better better modules and that we would be more dominant And we'd start to Achieve more of Dries's vision of thinking big and becoming a dominant web building platform for the entire Internet So why are not how are we managing this development team in ways that could be improved upon? So there's several ways First of all we could stop encouraging them to work on a one-hour worked one-hour paid basis So how many companies do we have out there where we sell the client? Essentially hours or we sell them a fixed-priced website building project and then we try and do it in a Smaller number of hours as possible. So we have a margin left, right? Those are basically two variations of the same thing where we either set the hourly price in advance or we figure out what the hourly price was Once we you know get paid for the work we've done in any case That's not scalable. You can't work 30 hours a day. You can't work 3,000 hours a day and You usually can't sell the work product from a website building engagement more than once The second problem with how we're managing that development team is that we're repeating the same efforts over and over and over again Okay, we're building websites that for all purposes resemble each other in a number of ways But in very few cases we actually take that resemblance that commonality abstract it take it make it a product and Just plug it into the next website Or that are yet make it so that everybody can plug it into every website Okay, why is there no one single what you see is what you can get editor? We haven't made it into a product. Why is there no one single does everything that you needed to image gallery? We haven't made it into a product. So we're repeating effort and every time we do that We do it in a slightly different way and it's inefficient now Obviously some things you need to customize for every website and you're never gonna get around that and you're never gonna Find a product that makes everybody's dream website out of the box right granted But there are things that we happily standardize on and we forget they exist like the log-on box You might theme it, but it works the same way every time right Maybe hooks into your LDAP or something and it's got some customizations, but that's all within the product spec 99% of all the sites we build They've got the log-in box and as long as they've applied look and feel they want to it They forget it exists. That's the example of a product if we had to write the log-in box over and over and over again Drupal would have never turn taken off. We would have you know failed already The next problem that I see with the way that we're managing that amazing development team Is that we're distracting our great minds? So we have so many people in the Drupal community who think big already who think of great products who think of Abstracted solutions to generic problems that would help a lot of people Okay, but there are very few amongst us actually if we look at absolute numbers Who can do what Jeff Eaton does and not only serve his clients, but then turn around and write amazing toolkit modules or? Product modules that he contributes to the community not many people have that stamina Not many people are able to actually fulfill their own expectations of themselves for contributing back to the community and writing all of the innovative Advancing ideas that they have in their heads So I believe that that development team that we saw has a large untapped potential for innovation That we're not getting to because we're distracting them with client work. That's repetitive and wasteful So there's another reason that we want to focus on products in the Drupal community in my opinion oops wrong direction and That is that if you have a great product in an ecosystem it boosts the whole ecosystem Okay, how many people? Buy Apple products because the hardware is so great. It's a great product So the computer that I'm running that just love the hardware How many people buy Apple products because the software is great, right? And then how many people move on to other products because in the Apple ecosystem because they had this great experience with one product You know iPad users who then move to Mac OS X iPhone users who do the same people who choose iPhone over at Android because they've already gotten a Mac Laptop there are lots of examples of Apple products because of the greatness of one product boosting the sales for other products This could be a great thing for Drupal, but we are still sadly lacking Great Drupal products in a lot of areas Now it's starting to change and there are a number of companies Several of which are going to share the stage with me in a moment who are Actually making great products and I think that we're going to get a lot of the effects that I just mentioned and hope for here So there are other dangers though If you don't make great products in your ecosystem, then you risk losing out okay, so I Have an anecdotal story to tell you there was a company that I've been involved with as an advisor for the past couple of years and that company has always had a split focus on both web services and development for WordPress and web services and development for Drupal and when I started advising them it coincided with a shift in their focus towards Drupal and they then went and released a Community module which provided a great service to Drupal and that was a freemium model that was supposed to draw people to their web services Didn't work out the way they wanted to and they started looking at other business models They thought well, you know one of the problems is we can't really find enough money to invest in the further development of our GPL module and if we could only find a way to like actually pay the developers to work on it more It could become greater and then more people would use it and more of those people would want to use our web services But the web services generation alone wasn't paying for the development of the module So they they post the hypothetical question on their blog. What if we Started charging everybody, you know 20 bucks or so for the download of this and you we use that money for funding the development of it And they basically got their heads cut off by the Drupal community I mean gone right it was it was a pretty sharp reaction That's not the way Drupal does things the community won't stand for it. It's selfish It's not the way we do things and so they said well, okay We'll do it for WordPress and they did they did it for WordPress The developers thanked them because then they could say to their clients this is a supported module by a actual professional development company and came with a support license and support forums and an actual business model and the price wasn't so big that in a $5,000 site build it was going to make any significant difference And all of a sudden this company started had having tens and then later hundreds of thousands of Dollars of sales of this WordPress code, which is basically just like a Drupal module based on GPL To invest in WordPress development Guess what we lost out. Okay. This is an area where Drupal could actually use a lot of investment right now It's one of the hot topics for us In in what Drupal needs to grow into it's one of the initiatives for Drupal 8 and that's hundreds of thousands of investment dollars That could have been ours So that's what the slide is about it's about not losing out in finding sustainable development models so that we can continue to invest in Drupal development So we're talking about selling stuff. Let's talk a little bit about what is a saleable asset for Drupal Okay, so we identified a couple things when when and Karen and I and the team were brainstorming this so You can basically sell usability if you can sell any sort of convenience to the customer that Overcomes a pain point in Drupal. We saw it in Dresa's slide slides in the keynote that people want Drupal to be easier to use If you can sell something to them that simplifies the website building process If you can give them something then you can charge them for essentially is what I'm saying It if you can solve any pain point in Drupal then you can actually turn that into a product that can be for sale You can take that money. You can hire more developers. You can make Drupal better How do you do that? Well distros are a great example of doing that How likely is a government agency going to be to use Drupal if you tell them that they have to go find the right modules? Find out how to configure them theme their site to look appropriate for a government agency This could be expensive build right costs a lot of money Maybe they won't want to do that how likely are they going to be if you could say look there's open public It was built for your use case It already has a look and feel that's appropriate for government and it's got some targeted features that solve some of the actual problems that you're trying to solve around open data and Profiles and directories of people Ways to collect ideation and ideas from constituents You've sold them already if you tell them you can do that, but you have to put them together in modules no way So there's convenience Okay, that's another part of it if I tell you you can build any slideshow You want with Drupal if you get views and you structure your data the right way and you get the right views plugins And you theme them the right way so that they shift at the right wrong time right time Then you know some of the developers in the room be like oh that sounds like a nice challenge for a weekend The rest of the people who are just trying to get a slideshow on their website are gonna be like No way, but if you can give them a downloadable app that they could just install and it does everything you need Configure the right way themed the right way works out of the box. That's convenience And then there's a whole range of stuff that you can sell around full service Okay, this includes hosting this includes consulting So there are lots of things you can sell to people that you can then use that money to pay your bills invest back into Drupal hire more developers around web services the Malam is a great example of that As well as beauty nobody box these days at the idea of selling a theme There are dozens and dozens of stores on the web selling themes for all major CMSs including Drupal and they're making good business So much business that a lot of the jumlah theme shops are now moving into Drupal's space Trying to replicate the successful business that they had for jumlah for Drupal Think back to the slide of the two guys running the race and one of them losing the race if jumlah Has a bunch of great professional themes available and Drupal doesn't that's gonna be one of the Differentiators for a lot of people who are just looking to get a nice looking site up So it's important to us that these shops actually come in and provide Professional looking themes and we've got a number of shops doing that and finally one of the things that you can sell to make People's lives easier about Drupal's knowledge. We've had that for a long time We've had the lullabots going and doing trainings aqua's got a training program But what if you could deliver that knowledge right into their website experience right where they need it when they need it Right once you need a delivery mechanism for that Once you want a billing mechanism to be able to pay people who had paid content Because after all you do want to pay people for your training content so that it's really good Nobody produces five-hour training videos at the best detail at the best resolution at the best quality with a lot of preparation for free Some people do but not on the topic you want when you need it in the place you need it So by paying people to provide the services that we seek and need We actually enable them to give them to us Okay, so that's the context Now we're going to move into the bit of the presentation where I start talking about what's actually going on One of the things that's going on and if you've watched the press releases if you watched aqua's website If you watch Twitter around the matter You'd know that aqua has built an API for their aqua network Which is now going to allow people to plug into it and provide a number of services Some of them would be apps if you will And we've done this we've been building it for about a year and we plan to we've now got some beta Services that are available to our customers now and by Q4. We want to make it generally available public and And looking at Chris Brookings to make sure I'm not saying anything wrong. He'll start shaking his head if I do So what would that provide so if you look at the if you look at the graph I've got here the aqua network consists of our support our cloud services and then third-party cloud services You've heard of some of them before like Malam Mobify new relic we've been advertising that we have those for a long time and those integrations were basically one-off Efforts, you know, we'd work with the partner to figure out how to get their services into our network But what we've been able to do then from that experience is generalize that and we know we want analytics and commerce social Media CRM video and whatever great ideas you're coming up with now in the or in the future to offer We want to be able to plug those in in a scalable way and and let you know people offer these to our customer base so the The services that we provide in an aqua network Marketplace include things like listing your product The ability to charge money for your product and pass it on to you the ability for you to interact with the customer in some way the things that you'd expect in a marketplace so some of the The new service that we have We have a tool called blitz, which is a load load testing tool And this is one of the beta versions or the the the the early adopter versions of the aqua network API That's going to be available later So that's a great tool that lets you set up a load testing service for your website And they've got a really great component that I really like about it They let there's a social component to the load tests and I've been missing this in Drupal for a long time If you if you have a hundred people who load test their Drupal website and they can compare results That would be really interesting like why is your site so much faster than mine? Why is your site so much slower than mine? Are they really that different and they provide this? that's going to be really great and The the other one that's not listed here is Drupalize me that's a service. That's a website that exists built by the Lullabots That's the home to their training materials It's a subscription based service where you pay money to get access to their great training materials and Starting immediately or in the near future all of that material is going to be available to customers of the aqua network so The important part of that is that when we talk about a marketplace We've already hit two really divergent use cases One is a web service that interacts with your website directly and another one is a web service That provides training materials to the end customers. So there are lots of different ways that a marketplace can be used So aquee's built that we've been building it for about a year and it's now going live. We've announced it It turns out that there are a couple other companies that are working on similar things and I'd like to actually Invite them to the stage now So we we're gonna bring up Karen Bortchart from phase two technology Evan Rudowsky from sub hub and Moshe Weitzman from aquia And I'm inviting them to the stage in the context of an initiative that has grown out of the Realization that a lot of what a marketplace does and a lot of what the marketplace has is Like really similar from one instance to another and it also comes from the realization that if you're gonna build a marketplace You have great incentive to make it the biggest marketplace possible Okay, when you're a vendor of a service or of a good Then you want to be able to sell it to the greatest number of people possible So it's not conceivable in Drupal at least at the moment that there's going to be one dominant marketplace like there is for Apple I'm not even sure we'd want that However, we do see marketplace is emerging So sub hub announced recently that they have an app store and phase two announced in Chicago that they have an app store And I can I've heard other people talking about building similar things and in a way Drupal the org itself is an app store or a marketplace so The realization that there was the danger of duplicating effort in five different Permutations That came the idea prompted this group to come together and We're happy as a group to announce that there is now a draft document about an open app standard That's been worked on and now published on groups dot Drupal org the URLs at the bottom of the page So the kind of the history of that So sub hub was actually the first out of the gate They launched their app store all the way back in November of 2010 and they've got customers who are using that and service providers using that Phase two back in Chicago in March Announced that and demonstrated that open public was going to have an app store component And that that would then become a central part of all of their distributions over time and then This week Acway announced that we to not only have a marketplace for the Acway network but that in the future We'd actually like to have something like this in Drupal Gardens as well and that we're joining the working group for the open Standard to participate in it to you know show what we've learned in building the Acway network Marketplace and if possible to adopt it for Drupal Gardens because we want the marketplace to be as big as possible And as inclusive as possible to give the people who are going to sell things in it the most Incentive to be part of it and that's very important So I'm going to read the first bit from the open Standard draft and then I'm going to turn the floor over to Karen Evan and Moosh So the goal and then we're going to move to questions. We've still got plenty of time for that The goal for the open app standard is to define the purpose and high-level components of an app Infrastructure in Drupal and to define the technical protocols required for the creation use and distribution of apps in the community And the larger marketplace I think that's very carefully worded to encapsulate and capture a lot of the values and Context that I tried to convey in the first part of the presentation So I'm very happy then to turn it over to my colleagues take it away Hi everyone big room So the two of the members of the open app standard working group that that you haven't heard about yet in this session or our face to in subhub We've heard a lot about about what aquee is doing So we'll just go through a little bit about what we're what we're each doing phase 2 we specialize in Drupal distributions and Actually built apps as a module that was a technical solution to a technical problem An open-sourced module we open-sourced a few weeks ago And built documentation for building apps, which we'll talk a little bit about in a minute, but The concept of apps itself we really built as part of a distribution not to launch an enormous war on app stores Or the concept of app stores, but actually to solve the problem a usability problem that people were having with our Distributions in Drupal and so that's really the the history and like where we came from at this Towards this idea and I'm gonna let sub have can tell you where they came from and then we'll we'll take a look at what the app store So like so sub hub is maybe one of the first companies to try to product size Drupal in the way that Robert was describing earlier kind of the Coca-Cola model where we're trying to provision thousands of websites to Consumers to individuals to small companies at a very low price points and we're trying to do that in an automated fashion While also giving them the flexibility and the control over what elements they incorporate into their platform So for us an app model is really critical in giving them that control, but also making it very modular and Turn key and deliverable at high volumes and at low transaction costs So that's really our motivation for for being here and participating and launching this kind of solution and this is actually a slightly blurry picture of our app store as it looks today within our platform and you can see a lot of similarities to app implementations on other platforms and it has many of the same kind of elements Apps are organized in various ways. We don't have a large enough quantity of apps yet to organize them by category but that'll come and also Users of those apps can rate them and rank them and write reviews of them So over the time the marketplace helps to determine which apps are most useful and most successful Thanks, and this is the app store in this is an open public So the apps that you see here again, you know easy to discover and find read about see screenshots of vote on up or down And then you know in this case these are all open sourced Open-sourced apps apps the modules themselves are all Are all open source and the module itself the apps module that goes into the distribution is open source as well So it's you know it again the the concept of apps here that we're looking at And the concept of an app market or console or store is really you know It's a very similar concept with a few different implementations. So together we and aquia These three organizations came together and said okay. Listen, you know, there's a lot of these The word app flying around let's get a conversation going in this community about what this really is and what it isn't and What it is intended to be and help to develop something that the community can agree on Around the concept of apps overall and then around the concept of how those apps become something useful in the marketplace In the same way that themes have become useful in the marketplace and training has become useful in the marketplace as a reasonable answer to a Customer need so we're going to talk a little bit about what apps are and then we're going to talk a little bit about what apps aren't so I get to do the positive one. What are apps? Basically, they're meant to solve a very specific problem They're meant to contain a discrete bit of functionality and be very easy to add to your website without any technical skill required That's part of improving usability as well because if you can do that obviously Drupal and the sites that are and the services that are built on top of Drupal become much more usable and user-friendly At the same time it makes it more Usable for the developer community It's a set of clear rules that enable a developer to come along and and write a discrete Solution to a problem and actually have that be very easily Deliverable across many many websites all at once and similarly it also makes it possible for Companies and organizations that are not part of the Drupal community to Build for Drupal without having to get into the deep detail of understanding Drupal So it opens up Drupal too much wider audience and much greater participation from other enterprises and other organizations that have services and products to offer but need to do it in a way that doesn't require them to Figure out Drupal first and then finally and related to that point it facilitates a Drupal economy So just as Robert was saying earlier the example of the the Drupal Solutions provider that ended up excuse me going to WordPress instead because they found a more receptive Economy that enabled them to make money. We think this is something that helps Drupal as well because it creates a way for people to build services and charge for them and actually as a result of that facilitates innovation and development of new features and capabilities Motivated a bit by a profit motive, which is a good thing in our opinion now. Let's talk about what apps are what they're not So earlier I said to these guys in another room. The best way I can describe apps are convenience nuggets apps are apps are really intended to be a usability concept around functionality in Drupal and what they're not is intended to be Something a way for someone to go and immediately sell their module just straight out. It's not about selling a module. It's about Providing a layer of usability download configure find Around functionality in Drupal. It could be one module or many so it's not just a way to sell to sell modules It is not a single out Drupal app store to rule them all It's not a a push for a single app store concept in Drupal that will that will take over the very important part of Drupal that is the open-source community the most important part Drupal And it's not a plan to commercialize Drupal or contract the open-source community So again, you know where apps are coming from what we care about in apps Is the solution that it creates in creating greater usability in Drupal and and in what we where we can go with that as a community? We'll try to kind of scoot through these so people have time for questions Okay, so why standardized obviously I mean the reasons for standardizing are really reasonable You don't want one person saying, you know, hey mail chimp come and build an app with us It's a Drupal app and we'll put it in our and it will put it in our app store or our app market And then have another company two weeks later going hey mail chimp You want to build a Drupal app not that kind of Drupal app a different kind of Drupal app? That's where things get really frustrating for third-party service providers And if there's one thing we don't need Drupal to be anymore is frustrated for any but frustrating for anyone else We want to make it easy so interoperability between Distributions between SaaS offerings between different organizations is hugely key if somebody builds a mail chimp app That can fit on your distro and then on somebody else's it's going to be more valuable to the community overall And then best practices and there are great ways to package together Functionality in a usable way and there are not so great ways So standardizing around some best practices there is something that we'd really we really think is is a value So we'll just go really quickly through what the what the actual standard is entails right now And do me to do that? Okay? So right now there's a working group. There's there's three organizations in the working group as of now But it's not a you know, certainly not a closed working group Currently the working group is all people who are who are doing or dealing with apps in some way already The open app standard is in draft on the groups that Drupal org site for open apps for the open app standard It is a draft. It is here and ready for comment question discussion And a forum around that and then there will be alongside that the ability to create open documentation for apps built on the open app standard so The API how to plan and build for them and then a manifest specification as well So and then the last thing we really see as an opportunity just going back to that MailChimp example is that? Those who are participating in the open app standard can potentially go to partners together and say, you know Hello MailChimp. We are 15 organizations who have standardized around a simple concept of usability in Drupal And we want to build an app with you and that's that that we think there's a lot of strength in those numbers So just and finally how to get involved is you know Please join the discussion at groups at Drupal.org Love it or hate it. We'd love for you to to make your opinion known Bring your partners to the table and understand what they need if what what they need is a usability Solution and if what they need is something that's more like an app and less like a customization Maybe worth discussing building an app for it and then start building apps as obviously the the last one that we would Really encourage apps the module is out on on d.o. And documentation is coming out around it Thank You Karen. Thank You Evan So now I'm going to open the floor to audience questions You can address them to me speak nice and loudly So I hear we'll repeat them and we'll keep all our keep our guests on stage so they can answer to sir So the question is how do apps differ from features? I'm gonna step right out take this to our technical team member. You thought you wouldn't get a technical question and you did No, we're calling in the backup So My name is Eric Somerfield. I'm one of the developers at Facebook did a lot of the work on the apps module So part of the when you look at specification one of the first things you see in the best practices for making an app is It be kick compliant So there is probably an expectation that most apps will be generated as features The apps part of it is a lot more about these best practices of Combining those things together and sort of finishing the vision that dev seed started with building the features module So technically, you know an apps a module So like just just like people used to ask what's the difference between a feature in a module And it's like oh well it is a module, but it's a module that does this extra stuff And an app is a feature that does their stuff and allows us to distribute it quickly and Allow more tie-ins to third parties and that kind of stuff So if I could then elaborate on that you could imagine an app that would deliver paid video content into the website to give Contextual help that would be a type of an app that is module delivered That's the technical level, but the product that's being delivered is more of a training service So it doesn't preclude those types. So you had a second question So the question in short is how will the commercialization of These apps change the community well, I mean that's really hard to predict and know therefore It's up to the community to be involved and that's why we call to you to be involved in the standard That's why it's an open standard and we'd like to hear your opinions on that of course However, one thing that I do anticipate is that there will be people drawn to the community who weren't drawn to it before People who might have written functional bits that would be useful to Drupal, but aren't integrated now That's one effect that I highly welcome because I think that'll help us grow and help us be in a more attractive offering for people to use Drupal But go ahead and most most hasn't had his voice heard yet Okay, thanks You know from my perspective, it's a foregone conclusion that there's gonna be app stores for Drupal. All right, so you have to start from there and If you agree with that premise then you want app stores to be good for Drupal right and to be done responsibly It's just like sex happens and you want people to have safe sex. So you talk about it It's a lot like that. So What we've done here is pretty remarkable You have cooperation between three different commercial entities in Drupal We definitely compete at different parts of Drupal yet. We decided to work together And we did it and we made an open app standard for Drupal and all of us are making an open app standard That's something that Apple didn't feel a need to do that's something that Google didn't feel a need to do And lots of app stores never have an open app standard And so I think you have evidence of the Drupal community doing it in a Drupal way already And you know if we can keep talking about it and keep doing it in a Drupal way then it's gonna come out strong in the end Thank you gentlemen in the front So the question is how would you sell software as a service products if the basic component of the products are modules? Okay So let's let's take a little Step backwards and and and look at the people on stage and what they're offering Evan has a software as a service Drupal installation as does aquia Drupal gardens in both cases That's the software as a service product which the end customer will never Directly, you know install their modules on because it makes it impossible to offer a software as a service product when you open that up Therefore we need a way to get code from outside to the inside in a controlled way So instead of giving the end customer the control to like use FTP to move Drupal code onto Drupal gardens We need a way to let them to choose a product and a service from the outside that they want that's met a standard That has a standardized delivery mechanism and then put that in there now it could be that Your software is a service. So know that we're not selling Drupal gardens through the app store Standard I don't I don't I don't think we're targeting go ahead Evan That's so that that's basically the purpose of a distribution The purpose of a distribution is to sell a well or the purpose of a distribution is kind of a Pre-created type of website for a specific use a market place for Distributions is not outside of the realm of possibility, but that's not what it's not now What I would say is that at sub hub It's kind of irrelevant to us whether or not it's based on a module and we already have examples of Third-party, you know software as a service or service providers In our apps or like Mailchimp, for example, there are others and basically in that context the app is something that drives people to them and then The customer then purchases that service from that third party and we get a cut So for us, you know the the app is really just a way of placing that third-party presence within our app store and giving The customer a chance to purchase that service and start by using a bit of that functionality Within the app to begin with so I think there are lots of ways that they can be implemented lots of motivations for creating an app a Module extension is one of them, but it could also be just driving people to use additional services that are offered by third parties Thank you evil So is the the question is Do we have to have a Software as a service environment for apps to succeed or are there other ways? If I understand the question right You're asking could we actually like have offered downloadable code Right So I think in the open public app store That there's actually mechanism for fetching code from a repository Downloading it and installing it. So I think that answers the question It could be a software as a service or it can be code that you download So is there a place planned where people can add apps to sell them? So the way that this is constructed is that there could be many places for that one place will be The open public app store another place will be the sub hub app store if Drupal Gardens moves to this model then you would have a Drupal Gardens Marketplace app store that you would be able to plug into and that's everybody on stage has the intention for making that place and What we're saying is we see value in making the mechanism for how to get into those places the same So that we're not, you know Creating those three different forms of video cassette that I showed earlier and like creating competing standards that make it harder to integrate I mean Google face is the same problem look at how hard it was and still is for people to write Android apps for the Android phones just because the platform kept changing so much every time Good next question you sir Okay, that's a really great point that we didn't address and that is the question was how basically how do you curate the offering? so that falls and that's a really important point, but the beauty of the Standard is that it doesn't address it. Okay, right? That's going to be addressed by the individual app store Curators who run it and I'm sure at that point the process for getting an app into Drupal Gardens In having it curated will be different than getting into sub hub Etc. And that's up to the respective maintainers of the app marketplaces themselves to be the curators for those marketplaces and all of the technical mechanism could be the same in all cases the business terms and actual curation process will most likely be diverging Yes, sir The question is doesn't this make it more difficult to find the right app for your business if you have to go to all These marketplaces our hope is that you could find the same apps in all three So that if you download Angry Birds You know, you're gonna be able to play Angry Birds whether it's an iPhone or an Android so the question is doesn't having an open app standard seed differentiation in the various products and to an extent it does but the the Growing the size of the marketplaces far more urgent to us None of us are big Aqua is not big phase two is not big Okay, the Drupal market is not even as big as we need it to be to really have a long future We need to really be concerned much more about how big the Drupal marketplaces and how dominant it is in the web content management sphere we That's far more pressing for us to solve than whether we're beating each other over the heads Yes, yeah, so what apps do you guys have Evan? Oh, sorry, the question was concrete examples of apps. So Evan is running an app store. What's in it? Well, we have apps like MailChimp, which has been cited a lot as an example Discuss is another one. So adding commenting to your web pages There's a Google search app to Analytics apps are to add analytics to your your site. So again in our case, it's really just a Way of giving people more control over what they add and how they configure their site By choosing these different apps. So those are some examples of third parties and in a few of those in a few of those cases We've worked directly with those companies to get the app built and to get it integrated properly and Karen What apps do you have in yours? We have an ideation app that creates a place for constituents of government website to add Ideas for what they want to see in their world and then vote them up and down and then Project mapper that utilizes development seats map box technology to map the projects of an organization or of an entity so you can Show a map of all of your offices or all of your or all of your projects around the world for an organization Again a good way to think about an app is solving a very specific problem for a very specific audience And I and I think that's that's the that's that's what makes a good app It's something that solves one thing solves it well solves it completely and these are also Examples concrete examples that our integration points for a marketplace The aquee network doesn't yet use the open app standard Maybe we will maybe our experience running it will instruct the open app standard. That's yet to be seen We've been working on it for a long time. It's already launched, but in any case the fundamental goal is going to be the same You sir Okay So the question is how how does licensing fit into all of this? so it's an interesting question because There's just like Dries head and his keynote yin and yang sign showing the conflict conflict between Easy to use and flexibility. We have a conflict between The benefits of open source, which we're all well versed in you know more eyeballs on the cord more people able to do it You can customize it it's got a Kind of almost an infectious license so that if I distribute code that I've based on GPL code It has to be GPL that holds true So the apps and Karen's app store are all GPL. They're all hosted on Drupal.org. You can download them there it's just a matter of in this case a convenience and Usability that you can actually find them and Install them from within your website experience and Since they're curated you know what you're getting you have guarantees about the provenance source of That code and there are a lot of value ads. So there's no change in When you distribute code there's no change in the licensing that's impossible for us legally We've got our hands tied. We can't escape the gravity of the GPL and nor would we want to So in the cases where your model is to distribute GPL code You have to find a way to monetize around that and that could include support contracts that can include customization that can include web services that Call out to external services that run code that you don't distribute like Malum Malum has a component That's a GPL module and a bunch of servers that run a secret sauce algorithm that protect your website Did that answer your question? It's a very important question and it was one of the fundamental ones Ben last question Sure, I can answer that question. So Ben's first question was do we have a? preconceived notion of the price ranges of different apps and the second question was and how will that revenue be split so This is a really easy question to answer because it once again depends on which app store you're trying to get it into Okay, are you trying to get it into phase twos app store? Then we'll talk to them Okay, trying to get in the acquies marketplace talk to them different business arrangements I Don't think you know I don't think I can answer that question I don't think we have time to go through that but I know that for example a lot of the web services that Aquia would like to offer will range from you know free you get them as part of the network when you subscribe to it like most of the ones we have now or Possibly in the future the value add is so great that we don't have a freemium model for or there's an upsell from a freemium model Where you then would pay something usually predicated on the external provider's pricing more to get that premium service an example for that is mobify The mobifies that you get when you subscribe to the aquia network You don't pay any extra for that You just pay the subscription price and you get something that is a tick above their freemium offering So you actually get better analytics Statistics from your mobify experience than if you went to them directly But if you want the full deal for mobify with all of their tools that they offer then you pay them 250 a month so That's already a different price point than your five dollar example. So and I've seen other services You know think sales force what do you pay for sales force, right? What if sales force were in one of these marketplaces? Hypothetical we don't have plans for that I'm just saying that their price points out there that are interesting for the running of a Drupal site that are way beyond five dollars and The eventual splitting of that revenue will definitely depend on which partner you're talking to Okay, thank you everybody for coming. We'll be around for more questions afterwards and thank you to my guests for sharing the stage