Thalasar Ventures

I have begun recently working with a PHP based CMS (Content Management System) call Drupal. Drupal recently got some play in Slashdot as their site went dark. Remarkably Drupal.org had a Page Rank of 8 on a shared hosting environment.

So they finally overwhelmed their hosting environment which resulted in a three downtime for their site. It should be noted that none of their customers were affected by this outage just their ever loving users. Which promptly coughed up a cool 10K to get them the hardware they needed. Since the Drupal community responded so quickly, they will be able to get a hardware set up which should last them for a while. It does hightlight that Drupal has a solid community behind and with just a bit of asking can help further their project. This means they have passed a critical mass in the open source community and that’s a critical barrier for any open source community.
Many open source projects are started. Most never get off the ground. My own project Xao has slowed development considerably. Only recently have I had time to reinvest into the project adding new features. Currently Xao far from the critical mass to sustain a project.
Drupal has reached that higher level of both developers and users so that simply by asking the community to extend support to the project. It’s a critical development in an open source project. As a clear sign of this Drupal was the 11 Google Summer of Code Awards. I look at this minor hiccup was good thing for Drupal as it forces them to upgrade their infrastructure to support the project. More importantly they learned the value of their community and that they can rely on their community to help them out when they need it.