For 25 years, the open-source community poured its heart and soul into Drupal, giving away hard-earned code completely for free. We built, we shared, and we survived.
But this year, the tech world suffered a collective heart attack because it finally found out what that feels like. When AI can produce a custom Drupal entity, a form, and a service almost immediately, the code becomes worthless overnight. Fine. The code is free now.
Different story: what are enterprises really pricing in?
Code without an author is a ghost in your system. AI generates code, but it does not understand it. When that code fails, breaks a layout, or creates a security loophole, there is no author to call, no maintainer to release a patch, and no community tracking the bug. You are trading cheap lines of code for total, isolated risk.
Speed to build is not speed to production. An AI assistant can build a feature in minutes inside a sandbox, but enterprise development does not live in a sandbox. If that code does not fit your deployment pipeline, configuration management, and architecture rules, it is practically invisible. It does not matter how fast you generate something that breaks the next deployment.
You are building a mountain of future debt. Cheap code means people will build more code than they actually need. But every line of custom code is a liability you have to carry, test, and upgrade through the next major Drupal version. AI will not volunteer to refactor your legacy systems for free three years from now.
What procurement actually buys. Procurement never bought code anyway. Public tenders score references, certified expertise, SLA response times, accessibility, and liability. That entire scoring sheet is untouched by AI, and it is where the money always was.
The build cost of software collapsed this year. The failure cost did not move a millimetre. An hour of downtime on a public-sector portal costs what it cost in 2019, and now it is harder to explain who wrote the thing that broke.
That is why the next few years favour the people who never sold code in the first place. Drupal's business was always running it, securing it, upgrading it, and standing behind it. That model just stopped looking weird and started looking like the only one left.
Dries Buytaert wrote about this from the vendor side and put it in one line: dependability becomes the product.
So if the code is free now, what is your team charging for?