Drupal’s founder says maintaining the infrastructure behind its open source CMS costs about 3 million euros a year and argues that companies benefiting most from the ecosystem should help fund it more sustainably.
We tend to think that when we deal with open source software everything is free, but the truth is that there is always some cost involved and if the user does not pay it, another entity or person is the one covering the bills. That is the case with Drupal, whose founder, Dries Buytaert, has revealed that running the infrastructure of a globally top 10 open source CMS costs roughly around 3 million euros a year.
This money goes not only to the infrastructure that allows us to download Drupal for free, but also to the system that supports a good number of additional maintenance tasks and updates used by everyone who builds their project with Drupal.
Dries, on his blog, argues that this cost is usually invisible to practically everyone and is chronically underfunded in open source projects. At present, again according to Buytaert, it is financed mainly through a fragile combination of donations, sponsorships and volunteer work.
And this is where he once again brings up the role of the large companies that use Drupal and do not collaborate to maintain its infrastructure. These companies save themselves this cost and unfortunately it is small communities or foundations that bear it, at least in Drupal’s case.
It is clear that Drupal’s founder is eager to change this precarious situation. He is now proposing to connect infrastructure costs with the organizations that depend on it the most and in this way create a more sustainable model.
Open source may be free as software, but the infrastructure that supports it needs an explicit economic model to survive in the long term and that model has to evolve. It could shift to a funding model linked to use or consumption, or directly to structural contributions from companies that depend on the ecosystem.
This latter idea is very much in line with what is happening in WordPress, where Matt Mullenweg is in charge of “encouraging” companies that benefit greatly from WordPress to contribute to the CMS core, something that, for example, WP Engine did not accept, triggering a war that is still ongoing in the courts.
On the other hand, it is hard to imagine the hosting bill that Automattic carries with WordPress, a company that also contributes decisively to the core. This cost is precisely, quite logically, what brought the dissident FAIR project to an end, as we reported a few days ago.
* Original article written in Spanish, translated with AI and reviewed in English by Jorge Mediavilla.
