IBM developerWorks - Why their focus on Drupal for Web 2.0 gives mixed feelings

IBM has published "IBM focuses on Drupal for new developerWorks series" By coincidence, on the same day that there is a post on Drupal.org from a user who would like to know how to make a business sense to convince the stakeholders in her company why they should use Drupal for their implementation of a Web 2.0 (read interactive and collaborative) website. I share the perspective of the evangelist in that I have been a true believer in Drupal, but from time to time, I run into a situation where a web-site owner does not seem to understand what advantages Drupal will offer compared to any other CMS. I have even been in frustrating situations where a a web team that is managing several websites (a total of about 200 pages) has sat through a number of my demos (first with one of my demo websites, and later using one of their websites that I rebuilt in Drupal), but a number of them still think that continuing to build and maintain their websites using Dreamweaver (shared local backup) with production templating is working well enough (without search or any automation) not to transition to Drupal. Granted that such situations are mainly due to the resistance to new things, but even when I have dealt with Web CMS believers, I have had to make a good business case for Drupal.

IBM developerWorks focuses on Drupal, now what?

In the last year, when Drupal was less as generally accepted as it is today, I was made to build several demos using Joomla, Zope, MCMS, Drupal and Magnolia CMS to be able to create a convincing business case why Drupal was the way to go. Part of the worry was that Drupal was not mainstream enough to be deployed without loosing sleep. I had to surf the web and ask around to see which reputable websites were running on Drupal . NASA , Linuxjournal etc were some of my examples and I almost got to the point of saying: "Just trust me on this!" - in any case, it's can be a waste of resources to adapt a system if the person that will install and maintain it does not know or trust the workings of that system. Now that IBM has banked on Drupal (albeit in a relatively very small way), maybe we are getting salvation from the problem that many of us have had so far: convincing those that have 'entrusted' their websites on us to trust us and just go with Drupal. At the very least, it helps convince those that have not heard the good things that Drupal has brought to the world of Web publishing and Web 2.0 in particular that if IBM thinks that Drupal deserves their time, then they too should give it a chance.

Paradoxically, the acceptance of Drupal by IBM or any other big software vendor worries me. It is the bloated, expensive, restrictive and sluggish applications created by such large and powerful vendors that fuel the motivation in many of us to write and support the opensource movement. It therefor worries me (maybe unjustifiably) that the more Drupal gets accepted by the establishment, the less agile and user-centric it will get. Acceptance will eventually limit the future capabilities and evolution paths of Drupal by defining it into a niche.