---
url: 'https://dri.es/money-versus-time-in-open-source'
title: 'Money versus time in Open Source'
author:
  name: 'Dries Buytaert'
  url: 'https://dri.es/about'
date: '2008-05-06T06:08:56-04:00'
license: 'https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/'
type: blog
tags:
  - Drupal
  - Acquia
  - 'Open Source'
published: true
id: 441
---

# Money versus time in Open Source

I think Sun/MySQL's [Marten Mickos](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A5rten_Mickos) nailed it when he said *"There's a difference between organizations that have more time than money and organizations that have more money than time"*. Read [Savio Rodrigues' post on InfoWorld](http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2008/04/categorizing_os.html) and [Matt Asay's post on CNET](https://www.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9935805-16.html) for more background.

Companies or individuals that have more time than money, don't mind asking support questions on the drupal.org forum, debugging problems or implementing missing functionality. Often, they thoroughly enjoy themselves participating in the community. This is exactly what the [Drupal community](https://www.drupal.org) is good at: collaboration and innovation. As a community, we should continue to invest in tools and documentation, and we should make Drupal faster, easier and better.

Companies that have more money than time, hire a consultant, get a support contract, and pay for a subscription to electronic services that helps them manage their Open Source software stack. They often don't want to collaborate or drive innovation. They want someone to cultivate the Open Source wilderness and to remove the product's pain points. This is exactly the business that [Acquia](https://www.acquia.com) is in. Acquia will build the Drupal-tuned analogue of the RedHat Network, over which we can deliver a wide variety of electronic services intended to be useful to people developing and operating Drupal websites.

Money versus time. It is a no-brainer. Marten nailed it.
