Drupal 5? Wow! I began my Drupal journey on the 4.6/4.7 'cusp' after working with J2EE & although I like Drupal because I can see the 'bigger picture' of the business logic being infused into the API, i.e. business problems solved = code as opposed to using something like Laravel & creating new untried, untested code all the time, I only really started liking coding with Drupal 8 as it's almost a complete rewrite from procedural to mostly OO.
The major problem over the years of fire-fighting various dubious installs of Drupal is people hack core and contrib modules making it impossible to maintain - if you use the APIs, grow modules & extend instead of hacking then it makes life a whole load easier - all I do to update my sites now is 'composer update --with-dependencies' (well, there's a few more lines to update the db if needed, export config from db to code, etc. but it's super-simple).
I hope you have applied a patch to protect against the latest security issue found, here's a link to an unofficial patch for 5:
Furthermore, use the Drupal Commerce modules for Drupal 8, releases are coming out thick and fast now. Commerce for 8 is awesome, you can have multiple stores (so like people have on eBay), product options are much easier than Drupal 7 to set up, and it's truly flexible so if when you A/B test or whatever you can easily alter the way your site works.
I've been Drupaling for 13 years, before that I was J2EEing, before that I was AS/400 RPGing. Before that I was PASCALing at college, BASICing and Assemblering at home. I've seen all kinds of businesses and startups, and I've seen what works and what doesn't.
My advice to you is to use Drupal because you can get far fast. Use lean methodology (lean canvas etc.) and get your MVP out as fast as possible and start making money. Don't try and build lots of functionality that you don't know works, and by works I mean makes a profit.
Watch GaryV, as he says - the market is always right. Focus on selling cars or vin checking or whatever it is you're doing, nobody apart from techies give a hoot what your site is built on. Some of the biggest sites in the world are built on PHP, e.g. Facebook. Some of the biggest sites are built on Drupal, e.g. Weather.com (the most personalised site as every visitor sees a different output, and delivers data to mobile apps).
Your code won't help your business succeed, selling will.
Actually it's always been a framework, it's just there's lots of shoehorning of CMS functionality. And it's less of shoehorning, it's just where the $s are flowing, I work with a team who do a lot of native CRM & BPM with Drupal it's just they haven't got $m so you haven't heard of them.
Drupal's fundamentally different than Django as not only are you able to code less due to the sharing of modules but you're also collaborating with thousands of others.
So with Django where you're coding coding coding, i.e. creating technical debt, the idea with Drupal is you only need to code what business logic hasn't already been built over the last 16 years. You're leveraging code and community, so you can focus on what you're good at and collaborate with thousands of others to fill the gaps.
Sadly no software license will stand up against corrupt governments, Freedom 0 is there to stop the creator of the software or derivatives thereof exerting control over the user.
Many people are paid to work on Free Software, companies like RedHat re Linux and Acquia re Drupal are two examples.
If by releasing your code suddenly means a whole bunch of people suddenly spring up and start maintaining it that's fantastic as it means your maintenance costs have disappeared and your users will be free and better off. If you can't find anything else for your staff to do of value, then your business deserves not to exist and you should set your workforce free to do something of value.
As for the firmware argument, you are mixing free code and security. Proprietary software is far worse for this, examples include pacemakers which don't cope for pregnant women but can't be reprogrammed, and of course the recent Volkswagen incident. You should be able to see the code which runs anything - especially cars which have to make life and death decisions, and security can be provided by comparing checksums during installation and use.
If you really would like to have a completely free software world then please learn more about it and stop the FUD spreading ;)
Interesting article, perhaps if a few of those "I'm bored"s were changed to "I'm helping make Drupal suck less by writing some documentation" or "I'm learning cool new stuff cos Drupal does the generic boring stuff for me" the author would have a more fulfilling life.
If everyone blows a little more energy back into the Drupal project, it'll suck a lot less ;)
The major problem over the years of fire-fighting various dubious installs of Drupal is people hack core and contrib modules making it impossible to maintain - if you use the APIs, grow modules & extend instead of hacking then it makes life a whole load easier - all I do to update my sites now is 'composer update --with-dependencies' (well, there's a few more lines to update the db if needed, export config from db to code, etc. but it's super-simple).
I hope you have applied a patch to protect against the latest security issue found, here's a link to an unofficial patch for 5:
https://www.drupal.org/files/issues/2018-03-28/sa-core-2018-...