Create Payload CMS Association as a non-profit organization

[MurzNN]

I came to the Payload CMS from another world - from Drupal CMS, with which I worked for more than 20 years, and I’m actually a very active member of the Drupal Association and help with promoting and managing the community, here is my profile.

So, have not only a lot of web development experience, but also experience with managing the Drupal opensource community and involving people into code contributions to the core.

Now Drupal Community is one of the largest open source communities in the world, having more than 1,000,000 members, where involved not only individual developers, but many commercial organizations, who contribute to Drupal a lot!

But the owner of the Drupal trademark is the owner of a single commercial company - Acquia.

Some time ago Payload CMS was free and opensource, but now the Payload team is joining Figma that is a commercial organization. It looks good, but the results can be different, depending on the results of this join.

So, I think now it’s a good time to discuss how to keep Payload CMS attractive for other organizations from the contribution point of view, but still keeping it owned by Figma!

Because, usually, when a project is owned by a commercial company, no other companies want to invest their contributions into it - unfortunately, the world works like that :(

And, to resolve this issue, I think it will be good to do the same that Drupal does - introduce a non-profit Payload CMS Association, reusing the same successful model, that Drupal Association implemented, and register Payload CMS as a Digital Public Good (DPG).

The head and the driver of this organization can be Figma, but via this way we will keep the opportunity to involve other commercial organizations into the association to increase the Payaload CMS development and implement more cool features.

And for contrast, want to share a bad example of the opensource project - WordPress! Yes, it's still free and opensource, but most of the contributions to the core are done by the owned company Automattic, and to get general functionality more than just "a simple blog" - you need to buy a lot of paid plugins! But in Drupal - not only the core, but all the modules (including a full-featured e-commerce) and themes are totally free, and this is awesome!

So, let’s discuss this idea here with the Payload community, what do you think about this?

[MurzNN]

Here https://www.drupal.org/drupal-services you can see a lot of commercial organizations that contribute to Drupal development and they are motivated to contribute not because of the direct commercial profit, but to improve the ecosystem and make the product better for their next projects. The same approach should work well for Payload CMS development, because it is already used for many large projects, but companies just do not share back their improvements and inventions.

[MurzNN]

And here https://www.drupal.org/docs/develop/issues/fields-and-other-parts-of-an-issue/getting-credit-for-work-on-issues is more details about how the attribution credit system works, not only for individual, but for commercial organizations too.

[MurzNN]

I think this is crucial, because I am afraid that after acquiring Payload by Figma, even if Figma keeps the project free and opensource, other commercial organizations will lose interest in contributing to Payload CMS core development, because without a good contribution recognition system, it could look to them like just sponsoring Figma with no direct benefits for them.