A Manifesto
for an Open Future

We are gathered at a moment unlike any other in our careers. Wars and trade walls reshape supply chains. Energy and capital tighten. Artificial intelligence rewrites, in months, not decades, how software is made, how knowledge is found, and how value is created.

The old model of selling time has been replaced with outcomes. The familiar shape of an agency, a product, a job, even a developer, is being redrawn in front of us. Some of us are afraid. Some of us are tired. Some of us see, in this same storm, the greatest opportunity of our careers. All of us have questions we cannot yet answer alone.

So we have come together. And in coming together, we have arrived at a single, unshakeable conviction:

A resilient civilization is not built on closed foundations. It is not built on platforms that can revoke you, on models you cannot inspect, or on code you cannot own. It is built on a digital commons that no single company, no closed platform, and no private model can take away.

That is the work in front of us. In an uncertain world, openness is the only strategy that survives, and a resilient civilization is the only future worth building. We could close our code, hoard our knowledge, and build moats around what we know. Some of our competitors have done exactly that. We have chosen the opposite path, with our eyes open, for our companies, for our children, for our clients, the public, and for the open web itself.

And in doing so, we build something that belongs to everyone, and therefore endures.

We are not alone, and we are not lost. We see the same horizon. We share the same convictions. We march into uncertainty, but we march side by side.

1. The future belongs to the open.In a world where trust is scarce, software whose code anyone can read, run, fork, and own is not a relic, it is a refuge.
2. Sovereignty and ownership is not optional.People, companies, and nations deserve the right to keep their data, move their data, and never be held hostage by a platform, a vendor, or a border.
3. Structured content is the foundation of the AI era.Machines reason best on data that is modeled, labeled, and meaningful. Drupal has been building exactly this for twenty-five years.
4. Security is earned, not announced.A quarter-century of public scrutiny, hardened code, and a global security team is a moat that no new framework can shortcut.
5. AI is a partner, not a threat.Used well, it lifts our craft, widens our reach, and frees us to do the work only humans can do: judgment, taste, strategy, care.
6. We are honest about where Drupal stands today.Drupal is not the shiny new toy that LLMs reach for first, and we will not pretend otherwise. But a handful of surgical, deliberate changes — to how Drupal is installed, described, and exposed — are enough to make it one of the most powerful tools an AI can wield on behalf of a user.
7. Drupal is built to be AI-native and AI-friendly.Open, structured, sovereign, secure — with the right adjustments, it is, by design, the CMS the next generation of intelligent systems should choose.
8. A new generation of Drupalpreneurs is on the horizon.We see them coming, and they bring Drupal back to its roots: empowering non-technical people to build websites, applications, and amazing things — now amplified by AI in ways the original web could only dream of.
9. Value has shifted to outcomes, not time and materials.The agencies, hosters, and product builders who thrive will sell results, speed, and trust — not timesheets.

1. To contribute.We will invest our time, our talent, our code, our content, and our capital into Drupal and the open source commons that sustains us.
2. To support each other.Across companies, continents, and competitive lines, we will share what we learn, open doors for one another, and lift the people whose roles are changing under their feet.
3. To tell the story.We will make Drupal visible — to customers, to the next generation of builders, and to the machines that increasingly choose on their behalf.
4. To meet the moment with courage.We will not retreat into nostalgia, nor chase every passing trend. We will build, honestly and ambitiously, for the open future we want to live in.