[development] One core, many distributions

[Gerhard Killesreiter]

Liza Sabater wrote:

> On Nov 23 2005, at 09:50, Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:
>
>> No, no, and no. The "community" (I hate that word) is not the reason 
>> d'etre for Drupal or the reason why anybody would develop for it. The 
>> reason is to get stuff done for our own needs. You are free to use 
>> it, too. But that's it.
>
>
>
> This is shocking for me to read. Seriously. I neve intended to offend 
> people with my lame jokes about geekatude but this comment is ... well 
> ... wow.
>

Lisa, this shows me that you have never been involved with open source 
development before. Welcome in the kitchen...

> I've had my eye on Drupal since 2002. Back then I did not had a clue 
> of what a blog was. All I wanted was something that would make my life 
> easier publishing on the web. I liked what you had but held off 
> because, as a power user of blogging software and not a developer, I 
> needed something that was easier to deal with. b2 is what I


That's completely ok.

I am not one of the people who wants all people to use Drupal for all 
kind of use cases. I think that Drupal is simply too much if you look 
for single user blog. Use wordpress instead.

> really wanted but by then the software had been abandoned (it 
> reappeared later as both WordPress and b2evolution). So I went the 
> route of MovableType because of its support and vendor communities.
>

And you paid for it (which is completely acceptable).

> I came back to Drupal for one reason : CivicSpace.
>
> What Zack et al have accomplished with that distribution is 
> impressive. And as


True, but I'd have that spelled Neil et al. ;) (merely for the reason 
that I don't really know what Zack does and Neil sends patches)

> political bloggers like me grow their practices from personal op-ed 
> diaries to activist communities, CivicSpace is, in my not so humble 
> opinion, the best thing out there for the potential growth of networks 
> of online political communities. From a strategic POV, 
> CivicSpace/Drupal makes more sense to me than Scoop.
>

I am rather surprized that you mention Scoop. It isn't a topic of debate 
on drupal.org unlike Mambo, Wordpress, ....

> But most activist community sites in the US are going the route of 
> Scoop. It took just one person, who happens to be also the owner of 
> the largest political community site in the US, to make the decision 
> of Drupal vs. Scoop and he went the route of Scoop for 2 reasons : 
> it's support and vendor communities.
>
> Do you see a pattern here?


You want to pay for using Drupal and getting paid support? This is not a 
problem.

>
> Scoop, MovableType and WordPress are gaining big chunks of market 
> share (especially in publishing) in the US while Drupal/CivicSpace is 
> on tentative ground due in part to the dichotomy between the 
> development and the marketing of Drupal.
>

I am not really interested in market share. I want people to use 
software that does what they need done. If MT fits the bill better than 
Drupal for a particular use case, then so be it.

> I am the only blogger from the top 100 moving to CivicSpace at the 
> moment. MediaGirl runs a Drupal site (not CivicSpace). Bob Brigham of 
> Swing State Project (another top 100) started a site on CivicSpace but 
> that's another short-term campaign site. In this case the campaign is 
> www.scalito.org. He was converted to CivicSpace in part by me. 
> Epluribus Media, a citizen journalism site that came out of DailyKos, 
> has 2 sites running : one on Scoop for their research work and the 
> other one on CivicSpace for their blogging. They were converted to 
> CivicSpace in part by Lynn Siprelle.
>

This is all very nice, but is only helpfull if Drupal is better software 
for their use cases. (Of course I think it is)


> Yeah, a lot of you call blogs hype and all that; but the reality is 
> that blogging is here to stay.


I always cringe when blogging is mentioned in conjunction with Drupal. 
Drupal is not a blogging tool (not in the sense the LJ or MT are).

> If anything, you are poised to get more development resources with 
> long-term political community sites than short-term campaigns because 
> you'll have people who've had enough time to understand the product 
> --even if they were not developers .


You probably know that I am on contract with CivicSpace, atm. I 
therefore get a lot of insight into the needs of such community sites. I 
am not sure this is in all cases directly related to Drupal core 
development. They are not different than other clients with regard to this.

> So your disregard about community in creating a community and content 
> platform is troubling.


The problem I have with the term "community" is that it is used to often 
and often not very specific.

Incidentally, my own use case of Drupal involves communities. But those 
communities are real-life and not on-the-web and the membership of those 
is thus clearly defined.

Cheers,
Gerhard