Summary: Business and Drupal

These are some initial rough notes on the discussion. Please feel free to add/edit your own thoughts, or link to an external write up at the bottom.

Licensing

Just to start off with a clear statement: Drupal itself is under the GPL, and all modules, themes, translations, etc. that are hosted here on Drupal.org are also under the GPL.

Integrating external code that is not under the GPL is an issue. In fact, any such code cannot be distributed here, but instructions should indicate where it can be obtained externally. There needs to be a review of certain modules to determine if there is any non-GPL licensed code in the repository.

A lot of discussion was around whether modules necessarily fall under the GPL as well. There was not enough free software/legal expertise in the room to determine this exclusively. Along with this was the concept of including sponsor links directly in code. It was thought that links directly in the project description, were sufficient, and that developers were likely to remove such links in any case. A "module sponsors" page might provide an additional incentive.

Robert Castello brought up a good point. It is likely that commercial created theme templates (i.e. the .tpl.php files which form the HTML "skeleton" of a theme) are covered under the GPL as well. Images and CSS are not covered by such licenses in any case, but would be copyright their authors. A tip here is that any theme designers should also mark their CSS directly with a copyright notice, and perhaps also provide customers with a readme or extension to the license file in the theme directory that makes it clear that images and CSS are copyrighted.

Bounties

There was much discussion over this, ranging from donations to bounties. It is unlike that a bounty system (i.e. guaranteed development) would be implemented directly on Drupal.org due to too many liability systems. The Gallery model of offering a paid support channel was brought up as one potential solution. The focus will be more likely on donations.

The concept of "reverse bounties" was brought up. This is where a developer defines or specs out the requirements for a project/module/feature and posts it in public, along with the expected cost of development. This would allow for development of rich features while appropriately compensating developers, and also lets users/companies know of what's possible with Drupal.

Case Studies

Need more write-ups, screenshots, and descriptions of "kick ass" sites. Might be done in a "featured site" position as well, hi-lighting different sites over time. Might be a good job for the Drupal documentation team, and people would be encouraged to write and submit case studies for choosing the featured site. Since Drupal.org itself drives a lot of traffic, this should be good incentive to do a write up.

As well as specific sites, more general write ups about types of Drupal sites might also be appropriate, kind of a best practices approach. Both of these functions might even potentially be handled by enabling story and allowing users to submit articles into a submission queue to be moderated by the Site Maintainers and/or Drupal Docs team (or potentially new Marketing/PR team).

Benefits of Open Source

On Drupal.org, provide an area to discuss the benefits of open source. Provide some boiler-plate text for use by consultants, links to external resources, and a "one pager" to point clients to directly.

Drupal Governance

This came up briefly, but was not widely examined. Later discussions indicated that a team or committee to handle financial and other aspects of the Drupal community might become necessary. This would actually be separate from the day-to-day technical development of the project. The concept of working groups or teams was discussed later on more extensively and will be discussed elsewhere.