I don't have to say that the entire community of Drupal users, designers and developers are indebted to Dries for having taken his university online community project into the Open Source world. In the years since, the Drupal community has grown exponentially. With Dries leading with a light touch and a small, dedicated group of core developers, Drupal has become one of the finest content management systems available today. And all the contributed modules make it one of the most versatile as well -- which is why we design and develop websites based on Drupal in the first place.

It speaks to values. Dries could have gone corporate and probably made a ton of money. Instead, he gave, and that simple act generated many orders of magnitude more giving by others. Only he can speak to the benefits he's reaped from sowing the Drupal seed in the Open Source garden, but I suspect it's been a good trade.

Ironically, Dries' blog is still very new. Worth reading are his thoughts on Drupal.

Congratulations, Dries and Karlijn!