Open Source

I've been maintaining the matrix_api module on Drupal.org since 2016, nearly a decade of it doing one thing well: posting Drupal events into a Matrix room. This year that changed.

Last month, a critical WordPress vulnerability triggered emergency patching across the web — and reignited a familiar argument: if WordPress keeps having security problems, why not let AI build something new instead?

It’s a reasonable question.

AI has made software dramatically cheaper and faster to create. But somebody still has to understand it, patch it, test it, and keep it running eighteen months from now.

That’s the part of the “AI instead of WordPress” pitch we think is getting overlooked.

On July 17, WordPress shipped an emergency security release for a vulnerability chain now being called wp2shell.

Vibe-coding is all the rage today. Who needs a developer when you can get an AI to develop an application for you? There are scads of application development tools now that promise to create that app you always wanted -- and surprisingly, these often work!

Call me a radical, but I don't think a handful of billionaires controlling the majority of a country's wealth is a good thing. I don't think the ultra-wealthy need more benefits at the expense of everyone else.

To wrap up our round-up of awesome open source packages, and to get back to business, our final selection for the year is NextCloud.

In the spirit of the holidays, we're doing a few posts on Free/Open Source projects that we use every day, that isn't what we sell.