I have the most interesting conversations while at open source conferences. A few weeks ago at CMS Expo I had a great conversation with Jeff Eaton about open source as it relates to things other than code. I'm not sure where Jeff had come up with the phrase, but he had recently realized that many of our best third party ("contributed") Drupal modules are "artefacts of paid work." Unlikely many other types of open source projects where a developer was "scratching their own itch", much of the Drupal ecosystem of code has been built by people who were paid for their time.

While this could open up the conversation to all kinds of interesting comparisons and rebuttals and agreements and disagreements, let's head off in a different direction instead. Contributing artefacts has made the Drupal code ecosystem incredibly healthy and a wonderful place to dive into when you are looking to deploy a Web site with a shoestring budget. There are, however, two main problems that we've not yet solved: designs can never be artefacts and training people has no residual artefact.

Several weeks ago I decided it was time to delegate some of my work. I needed a set of notes from one of the classes I taught converted into an eBook. I knew that I wanted to be able to edit the material myself and that I wanted everything to be done in an open source tool. "Easy," I thought. "I'll just hire a F/LOSS person to do this for me." It turns out: not so easy after all. I asked my network of people if they knew any graphic designers who did book layout and worked in open source tools. What came back was the sound of crickets. Inconceivable! How could there be no one who did this sort of thing?

A colleague of mine told me that he often uses online "freelance" networks to job out some of his tasks. He recommended both Elance and oDesk. I decided to give them a try. My job description was short:

I'm jumping the gun. Drupal 7 may not be ready for production sites, but I've got a book to write and books need examples. As a result I'm migrating one of my sites from D5 to D7. Moshe has been helping me through the migrate.module and I've been trying not to rip all my hair out as I learn new ways to do things incorrectly. (Pages, CCK fields and Events are all importing correctly into D7. Book hierarchy still needs work.) Some of the work I've been doing on my local dev server, but this week I decided to upload the work to date to a public Web site for others to look at. I was greeted by a D7 date.module error:

Warning: Call-time pass-by-reference has been deprecated in /path/to/modules/date/date/date.module on line 657
Warning: Call-time pass-by-reference has been deprecated in /path/to/modules/date/date/date.module on line 665
Warning: Call-time pass-by-reference has been deprecated in /path/to/modules/date/date/date.module on line 673