The Knight Foundation, http://www.knightfoundation.org, which has contributed over $1,000,000 in it’s history for technological innovation of CMS platforms, has pledged to support Drupal in the coming year. It has not earmarked an amount or a specific set of functionality, but it is allowing the Drupal community itself to decide what gets built and how much they will get to build it.
Via it’s page on http://groups.drupal.org the Knight Foundation will be accepting proposals for the work and the amount contributed, and via a community process it will grant funds to Drupal development projects for the general advancement of the platform.
The Knight Foundation has identified as it’s goal to bring Drupal (and other technology platforms) to the people. Not to the developers, but to the actual end users. Make it so easy to use, that everyone can set it up and use it. Some very intriguing things are sure to come about from this.