On January 15, 2001, 20 years ago, Dries Buytaert released Drupal 1.0.0 to the world. He was 22 years old and had just finished college. At the time, he had no idea that Drupal would one day power 1 in 35 websites and affect so many people around the world.
These are his 3 birthday wishes for the platform:
Birthday Wish 1: Never stop evolving.
Only 7% of the world's population had access to the Internet when Drupal 1 launched in 2001. Smartphones or the mobile web did not exist. Many of the largest and most prominent Internet companies were either startups (e.g., Google) or had not yet launched (e.g., Facebook, Twitter).
Why has Drupal remained relevant and thrived all these years?
First, we focused on a problem that existed 20 years ago, exists today, and will exist 20 years from now: people and organizations need to manage content. Working on an enduring problem certainly helps you stay relevant.
Second, we made Drupal easy to adopt (which is inherent to open source) and kept up with the ebbs and flows of technology trends (e.g. mobile web, being API first, supporting multiple interaction channels, etc.).
The good thing about Drupal is that we will never stop evolving and innovating.
Birthday Wish 2: Continue our growing focus on ease of use .
Today Drupal is much more focused on end-user friendliness and out-of-the-box experience. The community will continue to work on improving the user experience more and more.
Birthday Wish 3: Economical Systems to Maintain and Scale Open Source
In the early years of the Open Source movement, commercial participation was often frowned upon or even prohibited. Today it is easy to see the positive impacts of sponsored contributions on Drupal's growth: two-thirds of all contributions come from Drupal's approximately 1,200 commercial contributors.
We must do more than accept commercial participation. We need to embrace it, encourage it and promote it. We must reward creators to maximize contributions to Drupal. No open source community, including Drupal, does this really well today.
¿Why is it so important?
In many ways, Open Source has won. Open source provides better quality software, at a lower cost, without vendor lock-in. Drupal has helped Open Source win.
That said, scaling and maintaining open source projects is still difficult. If we want to create open source projects that thrive for decades to come, we need to create economic systems that support the creation, growth, and sustainability of open source projects.
To see the full article go to: https://dri.es/drupal-celebrates-20-years