Lars Eilebrecht wrote:
According to Steven Noels:
- http://www.netcrucible.com/blog/ ("The whole Apache project is impressive in the spirit of the pre-bubble open-source projects, but Apache's heavy dependence on BigCo funding (IBM, Sun, etc.) kind of disqualifies them and spoils the romance.")
Well, that's bullshit ...
Sure, never said I believed that.
The ASF does not depend on 'BigCo' funding and never has been.
Of course some of those companies have donated money, bandwith or hardware
which is nothing unsual.
The ASF is a membership-based foundation and only and individual can
become a member. How can a company 'buy out' the ASF?
The membership is free for the elected few, still ASF has operational costs (apart from kindly donated hardware & bandwidth). Conspiracy theorists might use that as a basis for FUD, as much as I hate it. But if I post a rebutal, I'd rather want it backed by facts than some interpretation.
I was wondering what might be true (or FUD) about this BigCo funding. Or even worse: are accounting records available? Of course, one might wonder whether such details should be made available to non-members.
IMHO accounting records can't be made available, due to legal reasons (?),
... seems a boilerplate sentence these days... Can't parse this: companies have to be quite public with their accounting books, whereas an open source foundation can't be for legal reasons? IMHO of course, and I might have been reading too much cluetrain lately ;)
</Steven> -- Steven Noels http://outerthought.org/ Outerthought - Open Source, Java & XML Competence Support Center Read my weblog at http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/ stevenn at outerthought.org stevenn at apache.org
