Drupal is a popular content management system that can be utilized as a publications and coordination platform in a variety of applications. The development team recently released Drupal 5.0. Across the world, 492 contributors participated in that effort, collectively submitting 1173 patches to this, the 35th 'minor' release in the last 14 months (though this was the first major release since Drupal 4, which was released in 2002). The history of Drupal reveals a commitment to upward compatibility, interoperability, scalability, and security.

The home development site, at Drupal.org, now has over 100,000 users - the size of a major company, from humble beginnings only 7 years ago, and all of this accomplished by volunteer effort. The ecosystem supporting Drupal is active and growing, and the architect team's continued refactoring demonstrates a commitment on the part of that community to adopt new technology, pursue enhancements to usability, and document their work. Since the community is big on the strategy of eating your own dog food, the quality of releases remains high.

Drupal is a direct result of the leadership of Dries Buytaert, who is to receive his doctorate in computer science early next year. Being a PhD student is tough enough - but simultaneously leading one of the most successful open-source projects? In a second language! That's impressive. Why does he do it? For the love!

But why open source? A related site that provides Drupal perhaps said it best:

Free software is not just free of cost (like “free beer”). It is free as in freedom (like “free speech”). Free software gives you the freedom to use a program, study how it works, improve it, and share it with others.

Additionally, the ecosystem is very responsive to change. A question that I posed on the Drupal.org site in March of 2004 received lots of attention. A comment I made on design features, though not directly replied to, were reviewed by the chief architect, and those ideas incorporated into future releases. A problem I reported got resolved. More importantly, I could easily look back in time with the tracker and see every interaction that I had with the site.

There are many commercial alternatives available to Drupal... but despite that competition, Drupal continues to thrive. Perhaps there is a message there about the difference between cost and value?

An excellent history of IBM's usage of Drupal is here. Insight about the direction over the next year is here. The trend towards businesses acquiring open-source firms is here.