Drupal Source Exchange Sponsorship

By carlmcdade on 19 Nov 2014 at 17:18 UTC

Dear Community Members,

The Source Exchange is looking for sponsors and hosting.

The Drupal community and ecosystem has grown emensly over the last 4 years. There are many community facets found in the Drupal world for service vendors, end users and themers but none specifically geared towards the developers, single-vendors and coders that make up the greater part of the reported 36,000+ builders of third-party software development. It is time for them to spread from Drupal.org and diversify and take advantage of opportunities that Drupal.org alone cannot support.

I believe that it is time for a change, a change to help the individual developer by taking direct action to help them rather than asking them for more time and effort to make it easier for others. We need to make a transistion to giving to those whom have given. For this transition to happen we need to create websites that will help them move forward by supporting the following.

Innovate ideas that cover a broader spectrum and expanding to a more open landscape for marketing those ideas.
Deliver more developer to developer communication and mentoring to close the widening gap between learning and true deeper knowledge of Drupal and PHP.
Promote and support the use of tools like github.com to spawn more and better collaboration on projects
Help developers find funding and other support needed for them to continue to contribute in the future.
Give developers help in creating business plans and ideas that work within the ever growing Drupal ecosystem.
Give developers an opportunity to create and maintain high-quality modules for long term success.

To give these opportunities to the most important members of the Drupal community I need the help from those that benefit most from the hard work those members have given freely. Your sponsorship of the Drupal Source Exchange through funding, advertising or hosting to help the community is greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Carl McDade
Director of Operations
Drupal Source exchange
Drupal.se

Comments

As a developer who has

Jaypan commented 20 November 2014 at 01:31

As a developer who has contributed some modules, I like the initiative. I have two concerns however:

1) Regarding this comment:

Promote and support the use of tools like github.com to spawn more and better collaboration on projects

I strongly disagree with this. We should be working to improve Drupal.org, not moving out to 3rd party sites. There are all sorts of reasons not to use 3rd party sites - we have no control over their Terms and Conditions, no control over their system stability, and if they disappear some day, we lose everything. We need to develop Drupal.org, not move to other systems.

2) Are you affiliated with the Drupal association? Have you got permission to use the Drupal name this way?

These are not valid arguments

Jaypan commented 20 November 2014 at 14:08

These are not valid arguments in that they are speculative without any logical evidence that such an event would cause an irretrievable loss of data

I would hope it would be backed up somewhere else, but the fact remains that by hosting it on a 3rd party service, control of the code is out of the Drupal association's hands. If said 3rd party ever changes their ToC to an unacceptable format, the Drupal association cannot do anything about it.

I've never heard a reason I would consider anything close to valid for moving Drupal code off Drupal servers. We should be upgrading Drupal.org to handle code the way we want, rather than shipping it off to someone else.

As for your site name and whether or not it violates the trademark, I have to ask about this:

Source exchange members receive payment directly as crowdsourced solutions.

Do you take a cut of this payment?

the GPL gives Choice and freedom to choose

carlmcdade commented 20 November 2014 at 17:06

There are many reasons for doing things or not. But it's always best to be given the choice.

The control is actually already handled by the GPL.

Everyone is allowed to do as they please within the GPL it is a personal choice. For you drupal.org serves well. For others it may that github is a better choice. Some go for their own servers.

http://berk.es/2012/03/23/several-reasons-why-i-prefer-github-over-drupa...

>>As for your site name and whether or not it violates the trademark, I have to ask about this:

Dries has puposely worked to make it fairly easy to understand. You only have to read it and obey the rules. But hey you are welcome to get advise or help in understanding it.

Source exchange members receive payment directly as crowdsourced solutions.

>>Do you take a cut of this payment?

I don't see how. If they are receiving person to person payment directly through paypal the only "cut" would be the paypal fees. Or if they are using a service like payloadz then their fees. The Source exchange is only a directory not an escrow service or a business.

I don't see how. If they are

Jaypan commented 20 November 2014 at 17:13

I don't see how. If they are receiving person to person payment directly through paypal the only "cut" would be the paypal fees. Or if they are using a service like payloadz then their fees. The Source exchange is only a directory not an escrow service or a business.

In that case, it's a nice service you've put together.

Thanks, I hope that I can do

carlmcdade commented 20 November 2014 at 19:51

Thanks, I hope that I can do a better job than drupalmodules.com. Possibly wake them from their sleep to becoming a competitor for delivering better service to the community.