fidzu : web

2026 marks the 30th anniversary of the establishment of W3C in Japan. As part of these commemorative activities, W3C Japan held an event for W3C members in May, an exhibition for the general public in June and an event early September for W3C members and the web developer community in Japan.

09 Sep 2026 8:50pm GMT

Open Source projects have spent decades asking companies to contribute. Projects should also give buyers the information they need to reward the companies that do.

Any Open Source project with a commercial or institutional funding ecosystem should publish an official contribution record: who contributes, how much and over what period, what kind of work they do, which parts of the project they work on, and, where disclosed, who paid for the work.

The test for a good record is simple. A buyer should be able to answer three questions in about a minute: does this vendor contribute at all, how much do they contribute compared to other vendors, and do they work on the parts of the project I care about?

Contribution does not prove that a vendor can deliver. It is one procurement factor alongside delivery capability, expertise, and price. It matters because some buyers want the money they already spend on Open Source services to help maintain the software they depend on.

Vendors that pay people to do that work carry costs that others avoid, and some of those costs may appear in their rates. A price comparison that ignores those costs can put contributing vendors at a disadvantage. I've argued that procurement should score contribution alongside price. APELL, the European Open Source Software Business Association, has also asked the EU to consider a provider's record of Open Source contribution.

Vendor claims are hard to verify and compare

Say you need a vendor for your Drupal site, your Kubernetes cluster, or whatever Open Source software you use, and two firms bid. Both say they're deeply involved in the project, and both might be telling the truth by their own definition of "involved".

Without a project record, verifying those claims often means reconstructing each vendor's contribution history yourself.

The code repository seems like the obvious place to start, but even counting commits by vendor is not simple. A project has to connect individual contributors to the organizations that employed or funded their work, and those relationships can change over time.

More importantly, Open Source contribution can include documentation, support, event organization, governance work, promotion, and more. Much of that work happens outside the code repository or isn't recorded in a form a buyer can easily interpret.

Projects decide which contributions matter

Drupal has tracked contribution credits since 2015, following a method I proposed in 2014 and now governed by the Drupal Association. Its system records more than code and gives credit not only to individual contributors, but also to the organizations and customers that fund their work.

Not every contribution counts the same. A contribution to Drupal Core or a strategic initiative earns more credit than one to a module that few sites use, and work on contributed projects counts for more when more sites depend on them.

Raw contribution data does not tell buyers which work matters most to the project. The project has the context to decide what advances its priorities and how different contributions should be weighted. Its record should publish those rules, link to the underlying contributions, and explain how mistakes or disputes are corrected. Buyers can then decide how much that record matters for a particular purchase.

Drupal has a strong foundation, and credits feed the Drupal.org marketplace where buyers compare agencies, but I'm not sure we could answer all three questions in sixty seconds today. We still have work to do to make the record easier to find, understand, and compare.

Projects can start with a simple record

Not every project needs a system as elaborate as Drupal's. A small project could begin with a short list: who its recognized organizational contributors are and what they worked on. A text file in the official repository can be enough for a first version.

More complex ecosystems may need separate categories or weighted comparisons. Whatever form it takes, the record has to be easy to find and quick to use.

So if you maintain an Open Source project with a commercial or institutional funding ecosystem, start publishing a contribution record and improve it over time. If you buy services built on Open Source, ask for the project's contribution record. Decide at the start how contribution should count in your purchasing decision, then check bidder claims against the record. If you fund Open Source, use the record to find contributors working on the parts of the project you want to support.

Where buyers can consider contribution, I expect projects with clear records to see more commercial opportunities go to their maintainers than projects that rely on appeals alone.

Special thanks to Henry Poole for his contributions to this blog post, and to Sachiko Muto, Tiffany Farriss, Tim Lehnen and Amandine Le Pape for their review.

09 Sep 2026 6:45pm GMT

Read one night of a Drupal or Backdrop site's log and most of it had no business with that site: WordPress login probes on a site which never ran WordPress, fishing for secret files, a thousand pages nobody ever made, from about as many addresses, one request apiece. On an ordinary server each of them wakes PHP for a not-found page, until no worker is free and your real visitors see an error instead of the site. On a BOA server those shapes are refused inside the web server before PHP or the database are consulted, the connection closed for what is only ever abuse, a cheap static not-found where a real page could once in a while match; the rest is judged afterwards by what an address did, a fleet by the share of failures it collects, the search engines whitelisted before anyone is banned; and during a swarm nobody can classify, each site keeps a limit on uncached renders so the cache answers everybody else. A block lasts about a quarter of an hour and lifts on its own.

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AI is changing how people build, search, and interact with websites, but not every organisation is moving at the same speed. Chad Capellman argues that Drupal's flexibility may matter more as different generations of the web continue to coexist.

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W3C Team and Members will present at Global Digital Collaboration Conference (GDC 26) which will bring together governments, standards organizations, open-source communities, the private sector, and civil society with a focus on digital identity and digital wallets

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The anniversary of the first public release of Web Open Font Format (WOFF) is a very interesting historical milestone on the decades-long road of W3C's work on fonts on the web.

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The post 7 Types of Article Headlines: Craft the Perfect Title Every Time first appeared on Smiley Cat.

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The post 5 Product Management Myths You Need to Stop Believing first appeared on Smiley Cat.

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The post The Key Strengths of the Best Product Managers first appeared on Smiley Cat.

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