On Sun, May 3, 2009 at 2:06 PM, Anne Kathrine Petteroe <[email protected]> wrote: > I have a question for Erik. > > In a comment on David's post you say: > "I just don't see the path, other than perhaps Siemens, SAP, or some other > sponsor paying people to write the code. Which, of course, would fit with > other ASF projects." > > How does this sponsorship work? > Does ASF have projects which are commercial open source?
Anne, I'm walking a fine line here, so full disclosure first (and apologies if it's perceived as spam): my company provides, among others, those kind of services and we have been, although in a somewhat different way, doing something very similar to sponsored work on another Apache project (POI) on behalf of a "sponsor" (Microsoft). I won't abuse any further of the public list, but feel free to contact me if you want to know more about what we did over there. There are loads of issues to be aware of, and Bertrand correctly summarized the most relevant, but it's absolutely kosher to hire third parties to develop code that might eventually land in Apache (if the community agrees, and if the _individuals_ who are writing it manage to earn their way into the community). Actually, the Apache license is designed with that kind of flexibility in mind, and the Apache community is built on top of a great ecosystem which takes all sort of collaboration into account, including corporate employees, contractors, sponsors, services companies, consultants, students and geeks. We know and understand that the vast majority of code that lands @ the ASF has someone footing the bill, but the Foundation goes at extreme length to make sure that such contributions are handled in a community-friendly way with all the Apache magic (meritocracy, community over code, etc...) in mind. So, in short: money can buy development time, and that in turn can buy you (indirectly!) community outreach and help in building momentum towards a successful project. It's an added bonus for that development time to be invested in an Apache-friendly way (i.e. no "code dumps", people participating to the discussion, meritocracy and all that), as otherwise you would run the risk of seeing contributions being turned down. What money will not buy you is any particular ASF love, cut corners, graduation or bent rules: actually, doing it right might require some additional scrutiny (e.g. the "three indipendent business entities backing the project" might require some review if you were to hire a third party to actually work on your behalf), but it might also help building an open and diverse community which is able to withstand the test of time. HTH, -- Gianugo Rabellino M: +44 779 5364 932 / +39 389 44 26 846 Sourcesense - making sense of Open Source: http://www.sourcesense.com
