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Community, OSL and Sun Jump to Drupal's Rescue
Robert Douglass writes "Drupal asked for help and received a major dose of it. Sun Microsystems has stepped up and donated a Sun Fire V20z server which will be the backbone of Drupal's new server architecture at the Open Source Lab. Furthermore, over $10,000 in donations were collected in a matter of a couple days (thanks to all the people who responded to the previous /. post!), plus thousands more in pledges from groups like Apress and CivicSpaceLabs... looks like the community loves Drupal!"
Pictures of the Sun equipment. Coral Cahed to boot.
Damn I'm a nice guy!
Now sun have donated a server with dual Opteron and 4G RAM. This alone would probably have been enough to host the drupal site wiht a serious improvement in performance. But they've also purchased 3 Dell 1850s with dual Xeons and 2G RAM.
Given what was serving the site before, do they really need all this horsepower? With the unexpected server donation from Sun, could the money raised have been better spent on something other than more servers?
Oh, and I was curious what drupal was too, the slashdot link doesn't give much more info than that it's a CMS, and drupal.org is down (looks like they haven't installed the new hardware in time for slashdot).
Here's the wikipedia with link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal [wikipedia.org]
Drupal is a content management framework, content management system and blogging engine which was originally written by Dries Buytaert and is the software used to power Debian Planet [1], Terminus1525 [2], Spread Firefox [3] and Kernel Trap [4], among others. Drupal is written in PHP using strict coding standards.
Drupal is the English spelling for the Dutch word 'druppel' which means 'drop'.
Though it started as a small bulletin board system, Drupal has become much more than just a news portal, thanks to its flexible architecture. Drupal has a basic layer, or core, which supports pluggable modules that enable additional behaviors. The modules available for Drupal provide a wide assortment of features, including e-commerce systems, workflow, photo galleries, mailing list management, and CVS integration. Drupal's taxonomy/classification module is especially interesting, in that it allows any content to be classified with a flexible tagging system.
Some of the more special roles that Drupal has filled include company intranets, online classrooms, art communities and project management. Many feel that Drupal's focus on user communities is what makes it stand out from its competition.
OMG!
The money they recieved were from donations. Not a penny was from someone who didn't want Drupal to have that money.
"Donations like this should be going to people doing things worth being done"
This is the stupidest thing I've read in a long time... Donations are given to people/projects which the donators think are doing something worthwhile, hence the donation!
I can't think of a singel thing to better prove if something is of value than other people giving money to support the continued development.
*shakes head*
It is so simple really.
You don't think Drupal is good? -Don't donate!
If someone else think it's good and they donate, don't bitch and whine about it. Clearly they feel that Drupal is WORTH IT!!
That's because drupal has their own development infrastructure and does not use sourceforge's services. Just because a project isn't hosted on sourceforge doesn't mean its not relevant. I switched to drupal from Post-Nuke about 6 months ago and will never go back.
Everyone should believe in something. I believe I'll have another beer.....
either the new horsepower hasn't been put in place yet, or they need more money to buy better machines ;) (or optimise the software, duh)
or maybe it got a sudden bump of popularity somehow... can't quite think of what it might be...
bp
http://tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/07/14/Dru
It seems that he deserves some credit for starting the ball rolling.
A nice comment in the article:
Drupal is very easy to customize. We turned it into a really cool location based community now complete with Google Maps. A place where you can share cool (or interesting, or weird) locations related to almost any interest.
Then, you can take them with you on your handheld.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
Drupal http://www.drupal.org/ is a content management system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_sy stem and runs on a computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer. It is written in PHP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP which you can read more about here http://www.php.nt/.
Slashdot has now become "News for wannabe nerds".
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.