Software evolves over time as any technology. When people invent new things, they usually launch new businesses for those inventions. They patent them. They protect their intellectual property for as long as they can.
At some point, proprietary technology becomes so prolific, that the need for agreed upon standards becomes necessary. Edison wouldn't have sold nearly as many light bulbs if they didn't standardize the size of the sockets and the shape of the two prongs, among other more important things like voltage.
Eventually, what was once proprietary intelectual property essentially becomes common knowledge. The scientific principles behind generating light were known to all, and some decided to innovate and create more methods of generating light, starting their own businesses, creating new & proprietary intellectual property all over again.
Proprietary to Open to Proprietary to Open
The same cycle continued into digital computer technology. Most software and techniques started out as highly protected intelectual property.
Linux came along in 1991, when the useful operating systems were all closed source and had expensive licensing. It took 8 more years for Apache to be released, in 1999. With these two free pieces of software available, the internet exploded. Everyone was empowered to put their own websites online for as cheap as the cost of a computer and a network connection.
Drupal came along in 2000, back in a time when you simply couldn't even get a CMS without paying a huge license fee. Over the period of time since, 100s of open source CMS were built, most of them in PHP. Eventually, most of us ended up using Drupal because of it's design and it's community.
Exploration & Innovation to Standardization
We are now in the "innovation" period of the field we call "DevOps". Big companies are being formed around amazing new technology. Everyone is making amazing tools that help them do their jobs easier.
What we don't have is a fully functional, easy to use, click to deploy open source system for managing the problem of web development. A common set of tools that we not only use, but contribute to. A platform that makes hosting, deployment, and testing websites really easy, and is open source and modular, so many people can contribute to it.
Drupal solved the Content Management problem.
OpenDevShop is solving the Infrastructure Management Problem.
Open Source Infrastructure Management
The requirements for launching a Drupal website are the same everywhere: what varies is the details of your configuration.
We deserve "cloud hosting systems" and "deployment workflow" no matter where we are required to host our websites. Many institutions are required to host websites inside their country's borders. They shouldn't be burdened with the high maintenance costs of "self-hosting".
With open source hosting tools like Aegir and OpenDevShop, organizations around the world get the power of Drupal cloud hosting inside their own borders and datacenters for little or no cost.
Bringing hosting back home is good for business for another reason: Local datacenters create local jobs. Open source already boosts job growth and innovation through operating Systems like ubuntu and RedHat, webservers like NGINX or Apache, and databases like MySQL and MariaDB.
OpenDevShop is here to bring the rest of the stack to the open source community: automation, testing, scaling, and management out of the box.
Our Mission
Our mission is to make web hosting, testing, and development as easy as possible, with entirely open source software; and to foster a community of those who share the same goals.
We aren't here just to support hosting: we have tools for local development, testing, and scaling: the full life cycle of a website.
We aren't here just to support Drupal: Aegir already has some WordPress support, and full containerization is in the roadmap. If it's in git, we will deploy it.
We cannot accomplish our mission of Easy Open Source Infrastructure just as a company: we will only accomplish our mission as a community.
Please join us in the chat room and in the GitHub Repo.