On Apr 28, 2008, at 4:32 PM, Victor Kane wrote:

I use Ubuntu, the free, open source, off-the-shelf release, and I am not forced to pay for a "Red Hat" version to rely upon it.

You *could* pay for Ubuntu, if you wanted, though.

But the free version is robust and works as advertised. I meant what someone else said about long term support. See below to understand why.

The question being raised is this: Is Drupal being driven to be such a fast moving target that real time-to-market costs can only be afforded by large shops?

If the answer were yes, then we are forced to examine whether economic/financial/corporate interests are at work pushing it in that direction.

Canonical is credited with speeding up the development of Debian, quite the opposite of making it "business friendly" by slowing it down. If we're going to compare Drupal (and Acquia's Carbon) to Ubuntu, the more accurate comparison might be Drupal=Debian, Carbon=Ubuntu.

Here is the point: try to step away from the speeding up of development mindset for a moment. I want you to understand another problem:

The immense cost of updating a non-trivial Drupal based site from 5.x to 6 to 7.

I think it is great that development speeds ahead. What the original RFC attempts to express here is the upgrading cost, immense and almost monopolized by big shops.

The community needs to gather round this real-world need: it is plenty specific and plenty concrete, I can tell you.

I plan on studying it and documenting it and publishing it, in a variety of ways.

Victor Kane
http://awebfactory.com.ar

Instead of sweeping the issue under the carpet.

Victor Kane
http://awebfactory.com.ar

Robert Douglass

Senior Drupal Advisor
Acquia
robert@acquia.com
+1 517 639 0204 (US)

+49 228 4097 197 (Germany)