When working with an open source project like Drupal, there's always the question of how a company offering professional services can invest in its open source platform. For vendors of proprietary CMSs, it's rather obvious: they develop and maintain their own code, in-house, or pay licensing fees to companies who own and maintain the code base.

With Drupal, we don't have any licensing fees. It's free to download for anybody anywhere, licensed under GPL v.2. And the code is already undergoing active development by top developers worldwide, whether we chip in or not.

And yet we at pingVision most definitely benefit from the continual improvements in Drupal, so it only makes sense that we invest in some research and development on the core code base and contributed modules. In an open source project, this means contributing to the community effort -- being a part of the do-ocracy that makes Drupal what it is. Besides, I feel it would be our loss if we didn't have our developers putting their expertise towards the commons from which we benefit. By giving we gain. It may seem counterintuitive to folks more familiar with the strictly proprietary business models, but it's the giving and sharing by the thousands who've been participating over the past six-plus years that has made possible the power, flexibility and scalability of Drupal as a first-line content management system.

So as part of that endeavor, we've implemented a "5% for Drupal" policy here at pingVision. Every person at pingVision is free to spend about 5% of their on-the-clock time each week for things Drupal, such as module maintainance work, patch rolling and testing, forums participation, new project development, and working through testing and debugging the latest development version to help improve the next version of Drupal core.

--This, of course, is in addition to the bug reports, patches and various module contributions we do during the day-to-day development routine for clients wishing to push the feature envelope. And all the work several of our developers and designers do on their own time.

We feel fortunate to be so involved with a project as wonderful as Drupal. This is the least we can do. We plan to do more. This is a start.

This idea was originally seeded last year by Jeff Robbins' 3% Campaign proposal, which focuses more on the financial contribution side. Contributions of money and work are not mutually exclusive. So while we do support the very young Drupal Association, this 5% is earmarked for the work side of the equation.

Many other developers do the same already, if only informally -- some doing much much much more. They have our enduring respect and gratitude. We feel that one of the best ways to honor them is to pitch in and help parlay their efforts into something even more incredible. We hope other companies and freelancers will join in the "% for Drupal" campaign. Whatever the percentage, it's a net gain.

• Laura's blog
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