In my talk at the OSS Watch conference, I drew on the words of several people far smarter than I, to help develop the theme of communities and how Apache is different to repositories such as Sourceforge or projects affiliated to specific companies. I’ll put the slides online shortly (though until then you could look at Stefano’s “How the ASF works” whitepaper and presentation, which provided a lot of inspiration and material for me). In the mean time, some of those quotes:
I believe our neutrality, both real and as perceived by the market, is key to being able to marshall the greatest amount of investment to bear on specific projects.
- Brian Behlendorf
Commercial entities are more likely to feel easier about “giving something away” if they don’t feel they are giving it away to another commercial entity.
- Matthew Langham
In Open Source, keeping a good balance between commercial interests and community-based development is the hardest thing ever. The Apache way goes a long way to make it easier.
- Gianugo Rabellino
Gianugo’s quote in particular seems fitting right now as Open Source communities work to integrate the Google Summer of Code students into their projects. It’s certainly going to be an interesting summer.
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