This week many of us at ISL are at DRUPALCON. Drupal is open source software that powers a large number of Web sites. Five years ago, this conference had 40 people. This one, held at Moscone Center in San Francisco, has 3,000 attendees. We are seeing logos of CapGemini, Accenture, IBM, and Microsoft (they are buying the beer at the parties). There are innumerable startups, enterprises and public organizations that employ this technology. If you want to see one prominent example, see the new Whitehouse.gov. A few years ago, my company decided to use Drupal for a couple of our projects. As of now, we are a Drupal company.

At the conference yesterday, the founder of Drupal, Dries Buytaert, pointed out that pretty much all software moves through a cycle, where a dominant player continues to add features until it over-satisfies its market requirements, to be replaced eventually by a nimbler player, usually with a smaller feature set (an idea from The Innovator's Dilemma), which then runs the course of its predecessor. Those who work with Drupal are hopeful that this software does not follow this pattern, because its functionality is completely modular, and its features are determined and developed by its community driven by real-world requirements. In turn, this allows distibutions to be created to serve specific markets. All this sounds like a great strategy to make a lot of money from this software. Keep in mind however, the software is entirely free. It is a little strange to talk about Drupal's "competitive edge" in the marketplace keeping this fact in mind.