Grand Junction Design, LLC

With the launch of opensource.com which was built entirely in Drupal by the great developers at Acquia and Palantir, we thought we would take this opportunity to toot our little open source horn and share why we think open source software is so important, and how it encourages innovation and creativity.

Have you ever used a program and wished it had certain features that were specific to your organization's needs? Or maybe your CMS software was acting up a bit and required some fixing and a stern "talking to". With proprietary (aka closed-source) software, your requests for a feature or support is at the mercy of some corporate honchos and you may have very little control over the speed, precision or accuracy that your requests are met. They are the only ones who have access to the code in order to provide you the changes and support you need. If this situation sounds familiar, it may be time start preparing your "its not you, its me" speech and considering your other options.

... Wait... what's that in the sky? is it a bird, ... a plane? No! It's Open Source Man! (complete with blue cape, pocket protector and glasses). This slightly nerdy super hero is here to save the day! ....

All joking aside, with open source software, your requests go out to a community of skilled developers all with a shared interest and passion for the product they put out. Changes happen more quickly with more people interested in the product's development. There are many options for you in terms of people to help you develop your open source software as well; you aren't just stuck with the corporate guys whose parents didn't teach them to share. Heck, if you have the time and experience with programming, you can even learn the programming language and work with the source code yourself!

All these reasons are why we love Drupal so much. It's a great community of developers who really care about what they are creating. If an issue ever arises on a site, then you can bet that someone else has already had the issue and that a solution is available. Drupal is so feature-rich because of its large community involvement, and more and more ideas are constantly buzzing. There are plenty of other options to consider when thinking about going open source, but our experience has taught us that as far as CMS software goes, Drupal is pretty fantastic and apparently opensource.com agrees with us!