Drupal Community is a misnomer - which legal entity runs, manages, operates drupal.org?

I have been a member of 'Drupal Community' for nearly 3 years now and I still fail to understand how things work and what the term 'Community' means. The processes of content moderation are ambiguous and are interpreted by 'Community' (which is just a handful of people with admin privs) differently with favoritism granted to certain 'inner circle' and other members of the 'inner circle' just supporting such moves. Heck! they don't even have procedures to remove some 'bad apples' from their 'inner circle'. Once you are in the 'inner circle' you can pretty much sabotage drupal.org to your own personal like/dislikes. So what I understand from the word 'Drupal Community' today is not the users or thousands of developers or contributors - its a bunch of people who have vested interests to control drupal.org and not allow a true and fair open-ness that is so much wanted in open source world.

If you challenge any wrong doing via emails or via comments on drupal.org, the inner-circle is so united that they will strategize and come after you and some members will even threaten to ban you. This is very discouraging and alarming too if you are thinking of being a long term contributor. In Open Source, this probably would be one off case where there are lot of shoddy practices.

Here are few points to consider :

1) Drupal.org does not have any legal information on which entity manages, operates and funds it. Look at its counterpart Joomla.org which has similar information listed which can be easily navigated to from home page. It is very important for anyone who joins this community either to contribute code, write success stories, case studies, improve documentation, review patches, provide support or even attend conferences to know that there is some place where you can take up legal battle with in case if your contributions are sabotaged or your investments in time on drupal.org are at risk. Not that this happens all the time but just an example that Drupal.org needs to come clean on this.

Here is what I wrote to Drupal Association

Question : Want to know which Legal Entity manages Drupal.org?
Answer : drupal.org is managed by the community. You can contact the Drupal webmasters through their mailing list at http://lists.drupal.org/listinfo

Ah!! Again the word community came up.

I keep getting stumped by this word over and over again.

There are people in this 'inner-circle' who put all laws aside and flagrantly misuse drupal.org infrastructure. And whenever I raised doubts, again the word community was put forward every time. I also run a Drupal Dev shop, with my team having given seminars in many universities, colleges, etc and have actively been part of few Drupal Camps in India and one Drupal Con. If I post a webmaster issue with some rational behind it and if some of the community i.e lets say outside circle(team members, other developers in the area, members from third world countries) supports the rational which the inner circle does not agree, which community gets its say? The inner-circle has been given rights to manage content on drupal.org and they have been repeatedly abusing it.

Here are few situations you may encounter and mostly hit the end of the road with the word 'community' slapped at your face.

- Try to find Advertising policy to advertise on Drupal.org (rates, processes, etc) and where to take your concerns on why a certain company gets precedence repeatedly.
- Try to find How to get case study promoted to front page and where to take your concerns. Your case study may not make it but a private shop whose owner is in inner-circle will get a story on front page promoting the product.
- If your content has been unpublished wrongly to favor certain people, try and challenge it
- It's none of the business of 'Community' to do a ref check with clients but heck they will do it and then keep mum when challenged on legality of this.
- A community of inner-circle will easily make a statement but then there will be no one taking responsibility for the actions.

Heck - Drupal Community will even talk about disgruntled employees from companies, calling few companies sweatshops, commenting on their operations without even understanding the rule of law of these regions. And the same inner-circle people don't even know that there are people(interns, Vice Presidents,etc) who have left their own organizations also having a grudge.

Community of inner-circle can disrepect you, be biased, do favoritism but they want you to show respect when you write. I'm waiting for few approvals from 'inner-circle' and would love to share some evidence in this regards. It will certianly show you the dark side of Drupal 'inner-circle'.

First, let me try and get a very important question answered - 'Which legal entity manages Drupal.org'. No one has yet been able to given me a clear answer including Drupal Founder. What I am given is round and round replies. There is something called 'Legal Entity' and every legal activity has to have one directly responsible and supporting 'Legal Entity' be it an individual or a structured entity. Of course if one has malafide intentions, such information can be kept purposefully hidden. I am not a legal expert but I am sure - A community cannot be a legal entity.

If you have already contributed your valueable time in Drupal, here is something that will go in favor of contributors - the whole idea of open source is that the process has to be open and transparent and you can challenge it from any part of the world depending on where you are coding/contributing from - this is what I am told. (Please do check with legal counsel on this)

On Drupal.org, there is no 'Terms of Use' you agree to. So this gives you as a contributor an upper-hand here if you have been not given fair treatment.

Thank you Barinder :-)

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi