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Drupal Voices 195: Robert Douglass on the Drupal App Store and New Revenue Streams

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Robert Douglass of Acquia talks about the Drupal App Store debate that he started in the Drupal community at the beginning of 2011. Most Drupal work happens from development hours that are paid for once, and usually stop after the site is launched. Douglass sees the trend of more and more Drupal products being created, which is going to bring in new and more recurring revenue streams for developers. An app store would also allow new types of consumers who are just looking to easily and conveniently get the functionality that they need, and may not even be aware that Drupal's open source community is creating it. Douglass talks about some of the ideas that he was presenting in his Drupal As a Mature Software Industry presentation that he and Phase2 Technology's Jeff Walpole gave at DrupalCon Chicago. He also discusses whether or not he thinks that there should be more formalized compensation for Drupal developers whose work is included within a Drupal product that is successfully monitized.

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May 25, 2011 - 11:18am
Drupal Voices
15:16 minutes (14.03 MB)
mono 44kHz 128Kbps (cbr)

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Comments

eigentor (not verified) on May 25, 2011 - 5:34pm

Thumbs up

Go, Robert!
Nice inverview, I like the calm tone Robert describes his ideas and vision in.

Recently I visited a Joomla Conference and you know they have this kind of model. It was very nice sitting through a presentation of someone presenting their Mailchimp integration module. We do not have anything comparable to Drupal. The stuff is much more polished and End-User-Oriented.

Someone who sells a product like this is very much tied to his stuff, and generally they do not make big money. The make decent money, but they do not dive into the dollars like Uncle Scrooge.

So the fear that Drupal would be sold out and someone making a fortune on the shoulders of that poor worksome Maintainer that creates the basis for that is unlikely.

I can much more imagine that they establish close contact with their most important base module maintainers and maybe sponsor this or that feature. It puts the module maintainer in a strong position: they need his stuff. Forking is not an option because this has far too many drawbacks.

Like Robert sais there is no guarantee, and publishing under the GPL means letting your child go freely into the world. But the collaborative DNA of Drupal is very strong, so we can be very optimistic.

I definitely do not regret Drupal Garden's Existence, with the new Views Interface and Webform alternate UI and quite a bit more stuff (indirectly Sweaver) having come out of it. So is it a bad thing if Acquia starts to make a dollar one day (I do not think they do at present) out of Drupal Gardens?

Anonymous (not verified) on May 25, 2011 - 6:43pm

This is the absolute worst

This is the absolute worst thing that could happen to Drupal.

Since Joomla's marketplace went commercial, it was flooded with absolute *crap* Indian code, all of which is just filled with security holes - we're talking about the sort of code where not a single field anywhere, ever, is filtered or validated. It's an endless field day of SQL injection / XSS holes, and don't even try to DREAM that someone might have enough of a clue to secure a module from CSRF attacks...

This is a long way from a complete list, but compare these two:

http://www.exploit-db.com/search/?action=search&filter_description=Drupal

http://www.exploit-db.com/search/?action=search&filter_description=Joomla

It is simply staggering. If we open Drupal up to a commercial marketplace like this, it will go exactly the same way. The current quality of modules available for Drupal is of such a high standard precisely because there IS no financial incentive - it is skilled programmers doing it for the love. The moment you bring money in to the equation, everything changes, and it will change for the worse.

Anonymous (not verified) on May 27, 2011 - 5:10am

that's a market too

There could be a secondary service market where security experts monitor commercial projects, give safety and quality assurance certifications, etc. They are paid either a flat rate or get a percentage of the product revenue.

Austin (not verified) on May 27, 2011 - 2:00pm

you can sell a website that

you can sell a website that you just built for 1 customer to a different customer. Your excuse for the app store around 7 min. related to this statement is flawed. Are you signing contracts with each individual customer? If not, then you can duplicate it. Further, it is open source software, so IDK if they can even have such a contract to begin with. Aren't you building sites using features, so that you can export all the features that you build for a customer? Don't you have different distributions for the different types of customers that you are building websites for? if not, i can't believe that you are building it from scratch each time. Its such a waste of time.

I agree with the statements made by anonymous "This is the absolute worst"

@Anonymous "that's a market too" - do you really think that it is a good idea to have independent security analysts who are not centralizing their research? Are you trying to pit us against each other. With your solution the home coder & the small businessman would get screwed by big business. only big business would be able to make sure there stuff was secure & then they would also know how to take out all the little guys who don't know about the security loopholes.

Think into the future instead of the current moment. By keeping the community open & free we will be able to bring humanity to new heights. Do not screw up this accelerated progression with the laziness and greed that has ruined so many other parts of our society

JeffJ (not verified) on May 28, 2011 - 1:04pm

The worst idea ever conjured up

Completely agree with Anonymous. I first started out years ago with Joomla. They have the exact same business model. Their App Store is filled with Junk with a capital J. Just because it is paid for doesn't make it good code. The Joomla store was filled with crap modules from people who just wanted a buck. There is nothing wrong with making a buck, but you have to back it up with great code. The reason we have such high standards is because the only incentives are 1) Advancing your own skills, 2) Contributing back to the Drupal community, 3) Helping other People, 4) Getting noticed from your work which will no doubt end up in paid work later. In an App store, where are patches going to come from? Who will fill their issue queues up? No one will except for the small few who will have paid for it looking for support. Lets not go the direction of Joomla. You want to "formalize compensation?" Dude, this is Open Source. This is the worst idea ever.