I made a comment to Peter Van Dijcks blog recently, and thought I'd post it here too. The discussion is about whether Drupal is to be considered dangerous to startups:

We’re having a “posture” contest here?
Assessing that Drupal is unfit for any serious venture calls for examples. I mean - Drupal ACTUALLY runs MTV UK, The ONION and several other large scale websites. IBM is working with Drupal, and so are other big shots.
I don’t think that such a comment is to be taken seriously.

That said. Drupal is NOT the cure all CMS (Whether C means Community, Collaboration or Content). It does have it’s drawbacks, and it is not easy to learn how to use to 100%.

Drupal can probably damage your start up, if you don’t know how the system AND the community works.
You will NEVER get your Usability issues addressed the way you want by the Drupal community. Drupal is 98% developers scratching their itches. They are smart geeks, but the approach to usability is only changing slowly. I know because I've been part of it since 2002, and I'm not a programmer but a communications guy and a strategic web consultant.
There have been several attempt at solving the usability problems in Drupal - and TOP GUN information architects and usability people have given their feedback. Some of this has been implemented, and more will in the future.
BUT - you cannot sit back and expect the Drupal community to implement all of your wishes within 3-6 months. It takes time time time - and some work behind the scenes. What you need to do, is to change the perception of the influential people in the Drupal community, which is hard work, OR you need to do it yourself/pay someone to do it - and show the improvements.
It is not a FLAW in Drupal - it is the way such a community works, and should work. If you expect it to work the way a commercial company works, the flaw is in your thinking.

So my understanding is: "Not understanding how OSS communities work - considered harmful to startups depending on Open Source!"
And that is not a question mark!

Bert wrote this:

Drupal Cobra

If Dries and Gunnar would cross post this blog posting, it would start the first Cobra-Drupal movement.

Well, apart from the fact that Dries doenst life in Brussels, Gunnar not in Copenhagen and I dont life in Amsterdam.

Update: Judging from the comments I get, I think a lot of people dont know which CoBrA I meant!

--

I crosspostet!

I have launched my - not finished - Drupal 5 based website for my small strategic consulting business: Social Media.
So now I'm live on Drupal 5.
Cool!

No I'm not quite dead yet.
Wikipedia founder remakes Web publishing economics.
Very interesting I'd say - especially this part:

"Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said on Monday his for-profit company, Wikia Inc., is ready to give away -- for free -- all the software, computing, storage and network access that Web site builders need to create community collaboration sites."

and this:

"Wikia aims to become is a clearinghouse of free software.

Armchair's software is the first of hundreds of freely licensed software packages to be hosted by the company in the near future, Wales said. These could include popular open-source publishing software such as WordPress and Drupal. Consumers would then have a single password across all sites."

When the software is free like that - what will be the business model of hosting services in the years to come?

No - I'm not closing the site down. I just realize that I don't have enough drive, time and energy to keep it going right now. I have other priorities, and I will decide how to keep this going. Until then, I will remain silent for a while. The feeds will keep working, but I will probably turn off comments in a few days.

The more I work with the new Drupal 5.0 beta2.0 - the more I envision the total success of Drupal in the new year. I have installed and worked with Organic Groups CCK and Views and some add on modules to these, and even though I have a little trouble with Panels, I have them working under 4.7.4 - so here's my verdict: It will totally change the world of Open Source CMS systems. We should build an install which has a standard installation of above modules - and no other CMS - Open Source or otherwise - can match the versatility, power and ease of administration.
I see a need for some education, but that is all.
If we think we had success with the previous versions, wait and see what happens when the world wakes up and discovers the real POWER of Drupal. It is extremely powerful to be able to build a list or a table of certain content and show it in a panel on a front page or similar. It is extremely powerful to be able to - by configuration - add new content types. I build a "task list" content type in 20 minutes with owner, status, type etc. I then build a view to show a list in a table.
I'm thrilled.
I have not yet found a way to "drag and drop" build a form - which will create a query to fill a table of results. I also wish I had a way of selecting a row in the results table - and have a detailed view of this item show up under or above the list. That would be REALLY cool.
I think there's a lot of potential in building this type of "design pattern"/"best practices" LEGO BLOCK type of site building tools. And I especially believe in the future of data oriented interfaces - with lots of interesting data to be dug into and discovered. Data mining and discovery is a big thing.
If that is true - then we will also need some visualization tools - like the social network analysis tool. Graphing search results is a big thing.
But that's a different story altogether.