Steven Noels wrote about BigCo take over rumors.
I get that question pretty regularly these days. Big firms tend to think of the world in terms of what other big firms control - so understanding it's part of a mindset helps. It is hard for people of that mind set to understand that cooperative development can be a real competitor to BigCo platform vendors. I find it helps to point out that the Internet is enabling buyers to erode the dominance of BigCo's distribution advantages. Buyers are self organizing - for example to expose product flaws and do product rates, or create content as with web sites etc. That open source is no different; we are just software users self organizing to create the software we need. That as the market grows big firms are discovering that's not a bad thing, that's just the way things now work. That big firms are getting on board and we would surprised if they didn't.
I worry about those thank-you/sponsor for in-kind contributions. How do you decide which in-kind contributions merit that public reward? How do you govern the editing of the page? How do you avoid insulting contributors that are less demanding? How did you decide that 10 thousand lines of doc was more or less valuable than one delicate bug fix, two sweet feature enhancements, or colo contribution. I don't think you can. I don't think you should.
are accounting records available?
I thought there were, I know we discussed having them be public in the first year. It maybe that some reason arose to keep them underwraps. The short form though is they wouldn't help resolve this issue. Most of our needs are met by donations in kind of resources - particularly the labor of the many kinds of community members.
I was wondering what might be true (or FUD) about this BigCo funding.
It isn't true. If you take the committers and distill out their employeer no firm has a significant slice of the pie. If you take almost any class of contributors and do that you don't get a significant slice of the pie. I'm confident that if somebody tried they could find a class that made the case for XYZ having a lot of leverage over something, but should that be a problem because the governance is in the hands of the members it would be fixed.
What has changed over the years is that the industry has become a lot bigger. So there are a log of BigCo players in the industry. The works of the foundation form a significant part of the inputs to the operations of some of those firms. It would be dumb if those firms didn't choose to participate in the foundation.
A paranoid might be afraid that one day one of those firms would mount an attach on the foundation by staffing a large number of full time contributors. These would act as moles. They would labor away until we admitted them as members, then they would seize control of the board. etc. etc. Of course at some point they would have to do damage to the license. This vile plan would be very hard to execute on, since it require years of work and at would take place in the bright light of public view. In the meantime the open source assets of the foundation would be growing stronger due to all those contributions the moles would be making.
- ben
