The Rise of Drupal and the Fall of Closed Source [Jan. 2, 2014]
By Jared Whitehead
The rise of Drupal coincides with a movement that values thoughtful collaboration over aggressive competition. Contrary to tmany proprietary software companies and products, open source projects tend to become increasingly user-friendly and the communities around them actively work to welcome newcomers to the fold. The driven and radical altruism of many open source communities offered this new movement the authenticity they hungered for and one-upped the commercial competition’s biggest selling point—affordability.
It wasn't long before the usability, affordability, and ideology driving the popularity of open source began to pose a major threat to the commercial software industry. At first, the industry reacted with indifference, but one infamous case wherein Microsoft released a series of attack ads against the open source giant OpenOffice revealed that open source was becoming more popular than anticipated. When members of the industry realized, however, that open source wasn’t going away, the market began to adapt. Software giants began their own open source projects, some as an attempt to court open source users and others as a way to promote further interoperability between systems. Open source communities began to influence new projects and the foundation of a new economic model.