The Drupal community has always championed open source principles and the open web, but many organizations still depend on proprietary solutions for core business functions. This creates unnecessary vendor dependencies, recurring costs, and potential security vulnerabilities. By expanding our open source toolkit beyond web development, we can help organizations achieve true technological independence while maintaining the security, reliability, and customization capabilities that drew them to Drupal in the first place.
This session explores how to build a comprehensive open source business infrastructure that complements your Drupal investment while maintaining security, control, and cost-effectiveness.
We'll examine five powerful open source alternatives that can transform your business operations: NextCloud for file collaboration, Matrix for secure communications, ForgeJo for code repository management, VaultWarden for password security, and LedgerSMB for financial management. Each solution offers enterprise-grade features without the recurring costs and vendor dependencies of proprietary alternatives.
The core value proposition goes beyond cost savings: with open source self-hosting, you maintain complete control over your business-critical platforms. These tools can't be discontinued, their terms can't be changed overnight, and your data remains truly yours. We'll explore both the strategic importance of platform independence and the practical aspects of self-hosting effectively, including modern deployment strategies that make management sustainable for small teams.
(This proposal was mostly generated by ClaudeAI, but based on what we actually do at Freelock!)
