Has Open Source Won if We Sacrifice a Freedom? A Report from Drupaljam Utrecht

The Dutch Drupal community event filled a single day with four tracks. It was maybe not surprising that the keynote speaker was Belgian Drupal’s founder and head-honcho Dries Byutaert. Reading my previous reports from DrupalCons in Europe and North America, you might expect that this guy does every keynote of every Drupal event. But no. As far as I understand, this was in fact his first in-person visit to DrupalJam, and his second keynote at the conference (the previous one was online).

The keynote contained much of the same information as his DrupalCon Portland keynote, and you can read more about my thoughts around Drupal’s Starshot initiative in my report from that event, Build-Your-Own Starship Enterprise — Reflections on DrupalCon Portland 2024.

Did Open Source Win — or Miss the Final Lap?

Following Dries’ keynote, I was next up on the main stage, doing a solo version of Defend FOSS: We need to remind the world what we're about, a talk I usually do with Jeffrey A. “jam” McGuire. The talk highlights the good stuff open source can contribute to the world at large and emphasizes how important it is that we continue to explain open source to the world. The world-improving impact of our efforts depends on the people outside our projects recognizing our unique value.

One of the talk’s main points is that open source hasn’t won. The general public doesn’t know what we know as open source professionals. Even if schools use and teach open source code, they don’t teach open source philosophy — and true free and open source software (FOSS) projects operate very differently to the curricula’s traditional competition-based market-economic perspectives.

The opposite position is “open source has won,” — quite a common sentiment in open source circles. I think it reflects the feeling open source practitioners can have, that open source must have won, because everyone seems to be doing it.

Removing Freedoms to Save Open Source?

But maybe it’s just the misplaced joy of falling across the finish line — one lap early? Whether we’re winning or losing was just one of the interesting topics discussed in The Past, Present, and Future of Open Source panel. Dries and I were joined on stage by:

• Ben van ‘t Ende from Age of Peers (previously TYPO3’s community manager)
• Emiel Brok, open source ambassador at SUSE
• Patrick Jenner, an independent open source solution architect
• Johan Janssens, CTO at Fractional and a co-founder of Joomla

One important topic that came up was open source licenses and the sustainability of the current open source model. Should we remove one or more of the four freedoms from an open source license — temporarily or permanently — to facilitate an income stream?

If open source has truly won, I find it is interesting that the sustainability of open source is still a question. If you pardon the war analogy, I think this is possibly a symptom of open source having won a battle, but not (yet) won the war. (I didn’t have a good answer there and then, but I was presented with it two days later, during the WordCamp Europe keynote. Read my report from that event.)

What Makes a Regional Open Source Conference Perfect?

DrupalJam was a well-visited and very compact event. The food was great, and so were the talks. In the end, I would really have enjoyed another day of Drupaljam. The one-day format was compact, and I would have loved another day of follow-up and interaction with the participants. Therefore, joining the after-event at my hotel turned out to be a great move. We talked CMS-es long into the night and during breakfast the day after.

Recently, I have asked myself what would be the perfect format for a regional conference. In the TYPO3 community, many have settled on the two-day bar camp format, where there is no set program and everyone participates in creating the agenda on day one. At the other extreme to the fully pre-planned event schedule, the bar camp gives you no opportunity to guarantee the learning outcome many managers want. In that sense, WebCamp Venlo strikes a good balance, with one day pre-planned followed by one day of bar camp for follow-ups and uncovered topics.

All of the talks at DrupalJam were recorded and are available now on YouTube. For a refreshing (and very Dutch) perspective on our relationship with technology, I highly recommend Rens van de Vorst’s talk. It ended the conference with both deep insights and some disturbingly funny examples of our interaction with technology.

Check Out the full YouTube Playlist