Dries Buytaert Frames Open Source as a Cost-Allocation System

Open-source ecosystems allocate maintenance and infrastructure costs even when access to the software is not tied to payment, Drupal creator Dries Buytaert argues in a blog post published on 27 August 2026. He writes that separating access from payment can also separate the people who benefit, the people who make technical decisions, and the people who bear the costs. Those costs may instead be distributed among maintainers, employers, foundations, sponsors, and users.

Drupal's update service provides his main example of how that allocation can become costly at scale. Dries says sites send one request for Drupal itself and another for each installed contributed project during an update check, so a site with 100 contributed projects makes 101 requests each time the check runs. He says updates.drupal.org now receives nearly one billion requests a month and estimates that Drupal core release-history checks alone may generate roughly 50–75 TB of data transfer each month, before contributed-project traffic is included.

The example also shows how infrastructure responsibility can sit with a different group from the one that controls the requesting code. According to Dries, the Drupal Association operates the update service and bears its traffic and infrastructure costs, while changes to how Drupal sites make those requests require involvement from Drupal core committers. He says the Association cannot make that change on its own because the core committers do not report to it. Dries argues that open-source governance therefore needs ways for groups bearing material costs to make those costs visible and influence technical decisions even when they do not control them.