On 2/25/06, Allen Gilliland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > As Ted said, we should be > working to meet the needs of our frontline customers and I believe that > means blogs.sun.com followed by IBM, jRoller, and on.
Customer is an interesting word when applied to an open source project. The dictionary definition is "One that buys goods or services", but the ASF isn't selling anything. All of our software is provided to the public at no charge. Looking beyond "buy", customers are the people who make the product possible. In the context of an open source project, the people who make the project possible are people like Dave, and Allen, and Avil, and Henri, and Matt, and all other other committers and contributors. Our customers are the people who provide patches and posts. Other people who simply download and use the software are *potential* customers (or "users"). From an ASF perspective, the core customer is the PMC. Now, if it is important to Allen and Dave, two of our best customers, that Roller meet the needs of blogs.sun.com then it should be important to the rest of the community too. But, blogs.sun.com is only important because it is important to Allen and Dave. Sun cannot be a committer, and so Sun can never be a true customer. Only individuals can be committers, and ASF committer rights are *never* contingent on employment. If Sun hired another developer to work on Roller, that individual would have to earn his or her karma in the usual way. The goal of an ASF project is to create the software that the members of the PMC want to use in their own projects. We do want to attract new users, because that's how we recruit new PMC members, but users are a means to an end. -Ted.
