Meet Matt Glaman — Candidate for the 2025 Drupal Association Board Election

TDT[1]: You’ve vigorously championed the idea of a Drupal site template marketplace as a cornerstone for developer sustainability. What would you do as a board member to ensure this marketplace model serves the broader community, not just commercial actors, and how would you avoid reinforcing structural inequities between contributors with business backing and those without?

Matt Glaman: I aim to empower solo entrepreneurs or small agencies to enter the marketplace. I want to ensure it isn’t a closed marketplace and is only available to Drupal Association Certified Partners because that creates a barrier to entry. We can’t expect uptake in a platform that requires a $1,500 minimum investment before you see a return. We can, however, find ways to highlight and build trust in items on the marketplace provided by Certified Partners.

If we were to limit the marketplace to Certified Partners, we would give access to sell on the market to a small subset of the community that makes up Drupal. I imagine many of these Certified Partners would benefit from items listed on the marketplace and those that they didn’t build. Wouldn’t it be cool if you launched something on the market and saw a large agency buy your product to deliver their project?

The marketplace will benefit commercial actors. There will be members of the community who disagree with it and won’t participate. But I hope they see it as a way to grow Drupal adoption by entering the arena that has made other platforms successful. I also hope they understand it diversifies revenue generation for the Drupal Association.

TDT[2]: You've publicly explored gated releases as a funding model, which stirs debate in open-source circles. If elected, how would you initiate a transparent, inclusive community conversation about commercial models without compromising Drupal’s core ethos of openness and shared ownership?

Matt Glaman: I first wanted to cover why it may stir debate. Drupal (and WordPress) are both GPL. You can sell GPL code as long as you also provide the source. But nothing can stop someone from publicly listing that code and giving it away for free. The argument then goes, “Why even sell the code?” I argue that you are selling authenticity and support of the code artifact, not just its raw source. It’s a bit of a thought experiment, and is a little hard to validate on Drupal.org, which hosts all of the open source code repositories and provides a lot of guarantees about the actual code you’re downloading or viewing. Luckily, this problem is much easier with Site Templates and other recipes than functional code in a module or theme.

Having “closed source” site templates is okay, but you cannot review the YAML until it is purchased. Otherwise, folks could copy and paste their hearts away and never buy it. But Site Templates and recipes are not runtime code; they’re non-functional in a way that transforms a site, and then they’re done. I’d be concerned about closed-source runtime code.

Could there be a day when a second Composer repository will allow access to paid code? And if you didn’t pay for the code, you can only check out the untagged version using VCS? I’m not sure. But I think that is a topic worth discussing after we’ve understood the current marketplace plans for Site Templates.

TDT[3]: You’ve built a business directly sustained by open-source development. How would your lived experience shape board-level decisions around investment, partnership strategy, and Association-backed initiatives to make open-source contribution a viable long-term career path?

Matt Glaman: I have experience working on a software as a service (SaaS) using open source software, which turned into contributing to Drupal core and contrib as a way to build our platform. Drupal has a few of these: IndieCommerce™ by the American Booksellers Association and OpenSocial. Running Drupal as a SaaS and experiencing some edge cases puts a different perspective and helps fund fixing quirky old bugs. But these are bugs folks may not get to or fight for without dedicated product time. The recurring revenue model helps stabilise that investment in the product and its core platform.

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I also have experience in consulting and building in the open from my time at Centarro as a co-maintainer of Drupal Commerce. Every client helped build and develop Commerce Core and its contributed module ecosystem. The hard part is that this has no recurring revenue model. The marketplace complements this model by providing some form of recurring revenue opportunities.

It may not always equate to a career path, just working on open source all the time. However, I see a way to have more companies build with Drupal and see value in hiring contributors who improve the project's health (code contributions, talks at non-Drupal events, or even DevRel-type positions).

TDT[4]: Many contributors in the Drupal ecosystem feel burned out, especially when sustainability depends on unpaid labour. What concrete infrastructure or policy would you advocate for on the board to shift this dynamic, and how would you measure its success over a two-year term?

Matt Glaman: I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I’ve had my bouts of burnout recovery. In January 2021, I burned out over the looming work of making phpstan-drupal/drupal-check compatible for Drupal 9 and PHP 8. This was around the time the Drupal ecosystem adopted PHPStan for deprecation checks in Upgrade Status. I felt overwhelmed with the task I was doing during my free time. I recently took a step back from open-source work after DrupalCon Barcelona and jumped back into it after DrupalCon Atlanta. I have GitHub Sponsors, which I use to pay for a few hours of maintenance work a month. I honestly don’t know how I would personally benefit from the marketplace. But I know some contributors who would and believe it’d give them more freedom to keep making Drupal a better experience for new users and our site builder persona. And that is extremely exciting to me.

Those folks might sponsor other contributors to help land more complex issues. I’m not sure. But that’s the beautiful part: we’re opening ourselves to new experiments and possibilities.