Open source is a fantastic element of the software ecosystem and recent studies have shown that it’s on par with traditional proprietary software. Drupal is one of the ring leaders in the open source movement by providing expansive, yet simple tools for Web site content management systems. It’s even so popular that it’s used for the White House’s Web site.

This past week Drupalcon was going on in Denver and Drupal’s founder, Dries Buytaert, spoke on the future of the open source CMS. Datamation reports that Buytaert attributes the success of Drupal so far on the passion that its engineers and programmers put into the project.

Buytaert says that the team uses this passion to make each new version of Drupal better with plenty of new features to go along with it. The team alone isn’t the only factor, however, as the community, like with any open source project, is key to its constant innovation.

Drupal is not without its flaws though and Buytaert addressed these. The two biggest problems are the authoring experience and lack of developers. They are already fixing the authoring experience and the developer will be fixed shortly. With the launch of Drupal 8, they will be utilizing the Symfony PHP framework to make development on the platform easier.

The company is also making HTML5 the default output for Drupal so it falls within open Web standards that make it easier for desktop and mobile use.

The entirety of Buytaert’s keynote at Drupalcon can be viewed below. According to Wikipedia, Drupal is used as the backend for 1.5 percent of all Web sites. It sounds like Buytaert wants to make that number grow. We’ll find out when Drupal 8 launches in August 2013.