The Drupal project is a great example of Open Source. A vibrant community with fanatical users and lots of great events held around the world multiple times a year, all around the world. Drupal is used to create web sites for communities as well as multinational corporations.
Aerys is an interesting project from the Amp project, which provides a non-blocking concurrency framework for PHP applications. Aerys is a non-blocking HTTP application server, websocket and file server. This sounds a lot like Node applications and it is very similar, but obviously not identical. Why even give async PHP a chance, now that JavaScript is everywhere?
Drupal 8 release date is November 19th 2015. That's the big day that thousands of people have been working toward. It'll be a major release - arguably the biggest change to Drupal itself in it's history. Read the details on the Drupal 8 launch article.