Backdrop is an interesting idea. Will a major publishing company publish a book about it?
This question will be decided as "no" if the book is digital or print-on-demand.
Major companies are currently defined as O'Reilly, Apress, Packt, Wiley, Prentice Hall (but may be revised to include similar publishers).
Backdrop is...a hard to define thing.
When will Backdrop 1.0.0 be released? The roadmap says summer 2014. The philosophy says releases are planned and scheduled. Seems like it should be some time in the "summer" of 2014.
The Ubercart and commerce modules are both growing in user base for Drupal 7. In April of 2011 I wrote about e-commerce for Drupal 7 at that time Ubercart had 900 sites on Drupal 7 while commerce had 500 sites.
Maintainership is defined as a full release module where the user davereid is listed as the primary maintainer. The end of 2012 is defined as 1/1/2013 00:00 UTC.
You can see the number of project's where Dave Reid is the node author broken down by sandbox and regular.
At the time of this question's creation this number was 66 according to the project page listed above.
So, this site has been around since December 28th of 2011. At the outset I invited a few friends like Ezra and Ben to help test it out. On today's Drupal Easy Podcast the site was mentioned which brought some new users so I guess this is the launch.
As we start there are:
Drupalcon is the main event for anyone working with or wanting to learn Drupal. Held periodically in locations around the world, the next Drupalcon will be Drupalcon Denver.
Previous events:
Acquia Commons is a popular installation profile for building collaboration sites. It is currently available for Drupal 6 though work toward Drupal 7 is under way.
When will the first beta release of Commons for Drupal 7 be released?
The Features module is a popular tool for packing configurations into units that add specific functionality to a site. It's a key to repeatable deployments and installation profiles.
Drupal core is pretty cool.
Which year will version 8.0 be released?
As it gets more obvious which year it will be additional questions may be created which point to a specific month, but for now let's try to figure out the year.
The Chaos Tools module currently has version 1 of release candidate before the final release (i.e. 7.x-1.0-rc1). Views recently had it's 7.x-3.0 stable release. It's likely that Chaos Tools stable will come in the near future. When will the release node of the first stable release of Chaos Tools for Drupal 7 be created?
