Drupal.org Fundraiser
The open source community never ceases to amaze me.
For those of you not following closely, I’ll recap. Drupal is a PHP-based content management system that has really started to gain some momentum. Drupal currently drives SpreadFirefox as well as a bunch of other sites and is the basis for secondary products like what the folks at CivicSpace are doing. In recent months, their shared server has really started to show some strain. They are often taking outages and increased server load due to their popularity.
In February, Chris Messina connected us with the Drupal community when their first started experiencing difficulties with their exisiting infrastructure. We had some discussions and offered up our services because the Drupal community is a good one.
We didn’t even seek out Drupal, they found us. Chris Messina connected them to us when they started having problems a few months ago. We offered up our services because Drupal is a great (and growing) open source community. Drupal really fits with the OSL’s mission of being “about community” because they are a tool that enables communities.
About two weeks ago, the Drupal folks got serious about sorting out their hosting and started a fundraiser email thread. We talked about what it would take to host the site, etc and came up with a modestly configured enterprise-class machine. The total cost was $3000 that we were going to shoot for. We finally sorted out the wording on the email and web page for the fundraiser and then let it fly around 1am PST 7/10/2005.
Within 13 hours they had met (and vastly exceeded) their goal of $3000. In addition to offers of cash, people have been offering hardware, hosted services and co-location to Drupal at a phenomenal rate. We’ll be able to meet Drupal’s needs and then some.
The amazing thing here is that a community has spoken and the OSL is helping by giving them a venue to realize their voice. It’s an amazing time to be a part of the open source world.
