Hi, I'm xjm. I'm a Drupal core committer, one of eighteen people who are trusted to accept (merge) code changes to the Drupal project for the hundreds of thousands of sites that rely on it.
My role on the committer team is that of a release manager. We're the folks who actually create the Drupal core releases that you can install on your site.
The most recent issue of Drupal Watchdog includes an article on software freedom and social change in Drupal. While this article raises a number of thoughtful questions about the social implications of the Drupal community's evolution, it includes some misinformation (both because it misrepresents the data that are easily available and because it lacks data that are not easily available). In the first part of this post, I look at the specific information presented in the article and provide some more depth, including some first-hand information about Acquia, since I work in Acquia's Office of the CTO. In the second part, I explore how we can mitigate some of the concerns the article raises.
