Open source only survives if companies participate

The rebirth of the Drupal community in Italy starts from a void that lasted years. For years there was no national DrupalCamp in our country. No stage to present a project, no room to meet the people working on the same problems in another city. Over the same period Drupal remained one of the leading open source projects in the world, running in production at large enterprises, public administrations, universities and media groups. And indeed, elsewhere in Europe the calendar never emptied: DrupalCon Europe, Drupal Dev Days, the national camps and the events outside our continent kept filling rooms every year. Here the community faded, and starting again meant rebuilding it almost from scratch.

Let us say it plainly: in Italy we are behind. Not on the code, which is the same everywhere, but on everything around the code: events, sponsors, case studies told in public, people who know each other. That is where a country’s weight in a project is decided.

Open source lives because some companies decide to take part in it: they sponsor events, send speakers, bring their case studies on stage. When no company does, the community does not weaken, it disappears. That is what happened in Italy.

This text started as a post on LinkedIn. We are expanding it here because the question deserves more than ten lines, and because it explains why we organize DrupalCamp Italy 2026.

Why did the Italian Drupal community go quiet for years?

The silence of the Italian Drupal community was not caused by a decline of the software. Drupal sites in Italy stayed in production, upgrades were done, agencies kept selling projects. What disappeared was everything that happens outside individual projects. You install, you configure, you deliver, you invoice: none of these activities requires meeting anyone, and for years almost nobody felt the need to.

Companies kept using it without participating, organizing or sponsoring anything locally anymore. What disappeared was the community, not Drupal.

It could happen without anyone noticing because of how Drupal is governed. The project does not belong to a single company: a global community leads it, with a non-profit foundation, the Drupal Association. The code stays in the public domain and no vendor can close it. That protects against lock-in, but it has a consequence that is rarely taken into account.

A proprietary vendor typically has a direct commercial interest in keeping the local scene alive: it organizes the national event, pays for the venue, invites clients, trains partners, because every person in the room is pipeline.

In a project governed by a foundation that role is vacant by design. The foundation coordinates the global project. There is no marketing department with a mandate to keep the Italian, French or Brazilian community alive: it exists only if someone local takes it on.

The Italian void is the result of a missing incentive. For years no local player thought that filling that role was worth the cost, and distributed governance does not provide for someone else to do it in their place. Last year someone decided to.

Rome 2025 proved that reviving the Drupal community in Italy was possible

In 2025 a small group of people, including us at SparkFabrik, restarted DrupalCamp Italy in Rome.¹ People came, spoke and contributed. Nobody had to convince anyone of Drupal’s value: a day and a place were enough.

For years the implicit explanation for the Italian silence was that “there is no interest here”. Rome showed that the interest was there and that what was missing was the offer. Anyone who claims an Italian Drupal community makes no sense has to explain why a room filled up at the first available opportunity after years.

The format is the classic one for open source camps: talk sessions, a space for contributing to the project and long breaks between sessions for quality networking.

The most productive part is rarely on stage. It is the moment an architect who solved a migration problem on a publishing project finds out that a peer from another agency has the same problem on a university portal, and the two exchange contacts. No online documentation produces that encounter, because neither of them knows in advance what to search for.

Open source is not just code. It is the people, the conversations, the case studies shared in public, and the relationships built in the hallway between talks.

DrupalCamp Italy 2026 takes place in Bologna on October 22, 2026, at the Savoia Hotel Regency, and compared to the Rome edition it changes on three points.

• Venue. No longer a university but a conference space, chosen for the city and how easy it is to reach.

• Organization. Three companies with roles and budgets split from the start: SparkFabrik, Bmeme and StripedCodex.²

• International reach. The program brings together Italian and international speakers, foreign companies are among the sponsors, and the Drupal Association officially supports the event and is sending a keynote speaker. A program like this is built months ahead, not in the weeks before the event.

How to take part and the details of the Bologna edition are collected on the DrupalCamp Italy 2026 page.

The point of Rome is not that we pulled it off. The point is that it can be done, and that the premise used to justify the void for years was false. What remains to explain is why nobody did it for so long. Probably because it costs, in time, effort and money.

It costs money, and it is not a business

Organizing an event like DrupalCamp Italy means renting a venue, covering technical costs, handling registrations and communication, and above all taking senior people off billable projects for whole days. None of the organizing companies makes money from it: there is no hidden margin and no commercial pipeline that pays for itself by year end.

This asymmetry explains the Italian void far better than the supposed lack of interest. Organizers put in money and time with no direct return. Those who use the software benefit from the community and the project anyway, whether they take part or not. Every Italian agency selling Drupal projects gains from the existence of trained developers, shared standards and a project that keeps evolving. None of these things produces itself.

Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, calls this dynamic the maker/taker problem: in an open source project, those who help build it (the makers) coexist with those who extract value without giving anything back (the takers), and when the latter grow faster than the former, sustainability cracks. His thoughts on balancing makers and takers to scale and sustain open source and on solving the maker/taker problem in practice concern the global project, but the mechanism applies identically to a national scene. A country of takers only does not have a community: it only has users.

A community is not a service someone else provides for free. It is the shared ground on which our businesses are built.

The ways open source communities stay standing are well known: event sponsorships, contributions to code and documentation,³ collective contribution days, companies that budget part of their time for the project. Drupal made all of this measurable with the Drupal Association’s Drupal Certified Partner program, which requires verified contributions and an annual financial commitment.⁴

At SparkFabrik we were the first Italian company to reach the Drupal Certified Partner Gold tier,⁵ which we wrote about when the recognition arrived. We mention it for one reason only: that kind of commitment has a price, it is counted, and it is not optional for anyone who wants to call themselves an official partner of the project. If participation can be measured, its absence can be measured too.

But if supporting the project and the local community costs money and brings no return, why should a rational company do it?

The strongest objection is that standing by costs less, but it does not

The strongest objection comes from those who only have their own profit and loss statement in mind. Drupal moves forward anyway, with or without Italy: core gets released, modules get updated, security is handled by a global team that does not need Bologna. Senior people’s days are the most expensive resource an agency has, and every day on a stage is a day not billed. Besides, knowledge no longer requires physical presence: documentation is online, DrupalCon talks are streamed, and even local meetups end up recorded.

A skeptic could even use our own example against us, the Talks on My Machine format: anyone who was not there watched it in full on YouTube without spending a day travelling.

After all, clients do not ask whether you sponsor a camp, they ask for a quote. With tight margins, a national event is a cultural luxury and skipping it is the rational choice.

It is a serious objection. It does not hold for three reasons.

1. Developers. The pool of people who can work well on Drupal in Italy does not grow on its own. It grows when there is a place where a junior finds out this job exists and where a senior isolated on their own project realizes they are not alone. Those who do not help grow that pool compete for the same profiles with those who do, and pay more for them.
2. The invisibility of Italian projects. In Italy there are Drupal projects that tackle precise technical problems and that almost nobody knows about outside the team that built them: multisite migrations from Drupal 7 with dozens of instances to consolidate, multilingual institutional portals with separate translation and approval workflows, integrations with SPID, PagoPA and registries on inherited databases, news outlets that handle breaking news traffic spikes without slowing down publishing. These are architectural choices worth comparing, and instead they stay in a private repository and in a few internal meetings. If nobody explains how a public administration portal handled the migration from Drupal 7 to 10, whoever decides a tender or a budget looks elsewhere. A case study presented on stage changes how the market, and public and private buyers, assess a technology.
3. Weight in decisions. In a project governed by a foundation, those who take part in the conversation influence priorities: which problems get addressed, which modules become standard, which direction core takes. At SparkFabrik we built the business around open source, not on top of it: the hours our developers spend on patches, modules and contribution days sit in the budget as a cost item, and the Contribution Credits they generate brought us to the Gold tier of the partner program. In return, when a problem met on an Italian project ends up in a core issue, we are the ones setting the terms of the discussion, instead of finding it solved in a way that does not work for us. Those who stand and watch inherit choices made elsewhere and discover them at upgrade time, when they cost more.

None of these three levers produces a return in the quarter the cost is incurred. All three impose a certain, higher cost on those who decide not to move: more expensive recruiting, technology perceived as less mature by buyers, a roadmap endured instead of discussed.

In Italy we are behind, but the country holds plenty of first-rate material that has never been put into circulation. There is a story of national scale to tell, and a community to rebuild around that story.

Participating is maintenance, not generosity

Taking part in an open source community is neither generosity nor patronage: it is maintenance of the shared infrastructure on which the businesses of everyone working on it depend. Like all maintenance it costs money, produces no direct revenue and is noticed mostly when it is missing.

Participation takes many forms, and there is one for every budget. If you work with Drupal, for DrupalCamp Italy 2026 you can:

• sponsor the event;

• propose a talk;

• bring your team;

• present your case study;

• or simply be there, in the room.

All the details are on drupalcampitaly.it. The official event page is on drupal.org; registration is open on ti.to. See you in Bologna on October 22, 2026.

We organize it because we believe a healthy local Italian community is good for everyone working with Drupal, not only for the organizers.

Notes and sources