1. Our Questions

  • Who owns the trademark?
  • How many contributors out there? Who are the top ones?
  • How long has the platform been around?

2. Community Cultures

Calvin Hendryx-Parker

Calvin Hendryx-Parker

Plone

Plone’s intellectual property and trademark is all assigned to the Plone Foundation. The Foundation has the task of protecting and promoting Plone and has a governance model that was put in place similar to the Apache Foundation. It is completely community run with a Board of Directors made up of people from around the world.

The Foundation also has membership that is based on merit and not sponsorship dollars. You gain membership by demonstrating members that they have made significant contributions that benefit the general Plone community. Also these contributions have to be enduring.

To contribute code to the core project, you simply need to sign a committer agreement and you will be granted access to commit code to the project.

The Plone Foundation was established in 2004. The Plone project itself was first released in October 2001.

The name Plone comes from the name of a band that the three founders of the project were all listening to around the same time, and it stuck.

In a Nutshell, Plone has had 103,811 commits made by 895 contributors representing 1,248,178 lines of code. Most of the Plone project code is licenses GPLv2, but some bits meant for re-use are re-licensed to BSD to make them friendlier for other projects to pick up and use.

Doug Vann

Doug Vann

Drupal

The word “Drupal” is a registered trademark of Drupal founder Dries Buytaert. The Drupal logo, “the Druplicon”, is GPL v2. The codebase of Drupal is GPL v2. The only caveat is that Drupal 8 ships with CKEditor, which maintains its original license.

However, when distributing your own Drupal-based work, it is important to keep in mind what the GPL applies too. The GPL on code applies to code that interacts with that code, but not to data. That is, Drupal's PHP code is under the GPL, and so all PHP code that interacts with it must also be under the GPL or GPL compatible. Images, JavaScript, and Flash files that PHP sends to the browser are not affected by the GPL because they are data. However, Drupal's JavaScript, including the copy of jQuery that is included with Drupal, is itself under the GPL as well, so any Javascript that interacts with Drupal's JavaScript in the browser must also be under the GPL or a GPL compatible license.

More information about Drupal licensing can be found at https://www.drupal.org/about/licensing

As of Fall 2016, Drupal is claiming 3768 contributors.

Lately, the Drupal Community has experienced a split between BackdropCMS and Drupal 8 fans.

Drupal 7 and below had always promoted an Ownership Society where the end-users could get very technically involved with their websites. Non-tech-savvy people could clickity-click-click the UI and assemble some amazing IA and business logic involving complex left-joined queries and dynamic image sizing without understanding what was going on under the good. If Drupal core or a contrib module didn’t provide exactly what was needed, a tech savvy person could then write a few lines of procedural code (often 12 or less) and have a direct impact on the way that a core or contrib module behaves.

Drupal 8 said "Enough is Enough!" and brought in Symfony2 components, Composer, PSR0 and a host of other more common methodologies and technologies. This move clearly positions Drupal 8 as THE ENTERPRISE open source solution, which is fine. BUT some Drupal core maintainers and many Drupal fans and contrib maintainers didn’t want to re-tool and re-learn a whole new system.

Here comes BackdropCMS! Established in Septemnber of 2013 as a fork of Drupal 7, BackdropCMS 1.5 is the current release. Just like Drupal 8, the DOT releases are significant.


Thanks for filling out the form! A Six Feet Up representative will be in contact with you soon.

Connect with us