As long as opensource exists -and maybe as long as software exists- people have been coding for money ("professionally") and for free ("gratis"). This is how open source works, scratching an itch where an itch can also be making sure you can pay for your food. There are many ways to earn a living coding open source, from the "give away the recepie, open up a resaurant" mantra to crowfunded support of a core chef.

An interesting new tendens is visible in the lowlands, opensource implementors -direct competitors- working together for *free* on marketing and code. In some ways that has been happening worldwide, but I do think that there is a trend in The Netherlands that might become bigger worldwide.

There are many Drupal agencies in the Netherlands and many of the people working in these agencies are active in the local and / or global Drupal community. Recently however 2 dozen of these agencies have been joining forces in a foundation Drupal companies Netherlands were they are together working on promoting Drupal to platforms were none of them could be present alone. This is from my understanding unique in the world and part of the reason why the session "growing the pie" was selected by the business track chairs. For a background interview see the Acquia TV site.

Now another interesting concept has come up. The Dutch national government bodies have a corporate identity and style guides describing how a site should look and work. They also have the obligation to comply to certain accessability rules based on the WCAG. There are over 100 Dutch government sites using Drupal and most of them have the same template. It would be a waste of resources that every implementer of a National government site would create their own template, waste of tax money and waste of time and talent. That is why Sogeiti and others made a standard theme for D7 on d.o/rijkshuisstijl. There are of cource some issues with rights on the logo but these are resolved.

The good news now is that in a recent "post-it" session Ordina, Limoengroen, Dutch Open Projects, Sogeti and many others together have decided that they will build upon this template to make it responsive, something the theme is not right now.

With the additional goal of having a Drupal 8 theme for the Dutch government the moment D8 hits stable. That would be the ultimate goal and do wonders for the adoption of opensource and Drupal in the Dutch government; a future-ready site with a validating responsive theme and the best CMS under the hood!

In case you want to join this movement, please do sign up for the linkedin group and get active in the issue queue of Rijkshuisstijl. And I do encourage you to visit the SDBN session at Drupalcon Prague.

I think that working together like these two initiatives is truly a sign of a mature market where competitors let the market grow together, in true open source style.