Lullabot News & Articles

Grand projects often start from humble beginnings. When the folks at Lullabot (news, site) decided to offer their training through streaming video, they had no idea of the can of worms they'd open, or where it would take them.

Lullabot (news, site) and Buzzr (news, site) announced a couple of things on Monday at Drupalcon. The first should make some potential enterprise customers happy, while the second might intrigue those who want to try out the service.

One way or another, everyone needs to eat -- and that includes all of you open source people too. Fortunately, there are as many ways to make money in the world of open source as there are people who try it. Here's a run down of the top models.

Normally in this space we look back over the current month and forward into the next month at what the various open source CMS projects are up to. But rather than blindly putting out an update for January, we thought we'd look farther ahead into what everyone wants to accomplish throughout next year. Call it our open source 2010 predictions with less guesswork and high hopes.

With all of the chatter about Drupal 7, it would have been easy to miss one or two Drupal-related announcements last April. One of those announcements dealt with Buzzr (news, site), a Lullabot (news, site)-spawned startup focused on bringing hosted Drupal solutions to the masses.

Aside from a small announcement last August, the folks at Buzzr have been pretty quiet, so we thought we'd check in.

Welcome to July 2009 installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next 30 days.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact at your project for updates.

Liza Kindred of Lullabot (news, site) began her talk at the Open Web Vancouver conference on open source business with a video of Dr. Vandana Shiva discussing saving seeds to preserve the right of farmers to grow their crops the way they have for thousands of years. Dr. Shiva referred to this practice of preserving traditional knowledge as open seeds, and compared it to open source.

Her point was that by going into an open source business, you have the opportunity to do more than just make a profit. By playing well with others, you can do so much more.

GPL as a business model was the subject of Jeff Eaton of Lullabot's session at the CMS Expo.

He began the session by explaining the difference between free as in speech and free as in beer.

Jeff then went on to outline what it means to release software under the GPL license including the right to get the source code and the right to customize and distribute the software.

There were several questions from the audience and it was clear that the question of what will come of MySQL after the acquisition of Sun by Oracle was a common concern.

Take away points included:

• GPL breeds GPL
• If you distribute, others can distribute
• Your code may be a product but it may also be a tool you use to deliver a product
• Sell your brain, the understanding of people and problems is your most valuable asset

Jeff went on to outline various ways to make money in the GPL world.

[Editor's Note: See our detailed article Open Source: The GPL, Your CMS Project and You]

Now there’s a headline you never thought you’d see. Young Innovations, a Drupal development firm from the mystical land of Nepal, has released a beginners guide, in English, for the Drupal open source web content management system. Drupal how to For Beginners was developed by Young Innovations in conjunction with SAP, and is freely available under a Creative Commons license.

Dries Buytaert, founder of the wildly popular Drupal Open Source Web CMS was recently interviewed on internetnews.com by Sean Michael Kerner.