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Posted to community@apache.org by Steven Noels <st...@outerthought.org> on 2003/01/28 11:25:41 UTC
sponsoring of asf: fud or truth?
Hi all,
in the light of:
- 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.")
Sam's rebutal (sort of):
- http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/1163.html
and then:
- http://jakarta.apache.org/site/acknowledgements.html
- http://xml.apache.org/ack.html
- http://perl.apache.org/about/contributors/companies.html
- http://www.php.net/thanks.php
being mostly about infrastructural or committer sponsoring,
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.
OTOH, I don't like seeing such statements when you know, from the
inside, than Sun nor IBM have 'bought out' ASF.
</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
Re: sponsoring of asf: fud or truth?
Posted by Jeff Trawick <tr...@attglobal.net>.
Steven Noels wrote:
> 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.
> OTOH, I don't like seeing such statements when you know, from the
> inside, than Sun nor IBM have 'bought out' ASF.
It all boils down to committer sponsoring. There is no hard cash to
speak of.
Even ASF members will on occasion try to characterize somebody's
involvement in an ASF project based on who pays their mortgage, and I
have never seen anything remotely accurate come out of that.
The only story to communicate is that we come to the ASF as individuals,
not as representatives of a corporation, and what we do is based on the
merit of our proposals and the quality of our implementations, not on
who buys the coffee.
Re: sponsoring of asf: fud or truth?
Posted by Steven Noels <st...@outerthought.org>.
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
Re: sponsoring of asf: fud or truth?
Posted by Dirk-Willem van Gulik <di...@webweaving.org>.
On Tue, 28 Jan 2003, 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 ... 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.
And let's not forget another source of softer money; the 550 odd companies
which pay the salaries of our committers; most of whom work on apache code
in the boss their time. (In fact; looking at some of the statistics
gathered by social/antropology researchers (you know - these folks who
pester coding lists with Surveys) - it is interesting to see a split
between the Apache/BSD and GPL community; the latter does more in their
own time; and tends to be more isolationalist; whereas this crowd tends to
mix their real work and apache work much more seamlessly.. that is if you
believe statistics with N<50 :-)
Though some companies may have (had at times) a fair chunk of committers
working for them; those numbers are hardly ever above 10 or so for any
given company, perhaps hitting 2% of the total committer base which is
in the 650's or so.
And over the past 5 years we've seen quite a few concentrations of
committers appear and then disband later (e.g. Organic/wired, Critical
Path, even SUN had a large chunk at one point; they dispersed, same for
IBM, then Covalent has disgorged itself of committers in the last 12
months, etc, etc).
In fact it is kind of interesting to see individuals floating through
industry; working for IBM, Sun, BEA, a small private company, someone big
again; but yet continue to play the same role in the Apache community.
Combine this with another trend, at the O'Reilly open source conference, a
fair number of people has brought their kids and families, several times
in a row now, and you suddenly see social/familly cultures around this
volunteer work, across virtual links - which somehow seem more real and
persistant than the employer of the week. It is almost as if you're back
to the period before the industrial revolution; where famillies, rather
than a person, where tied to economic activities. And where the concept of
'holiday' or 'your own free time' was also essentially not existent as a
clear separate thing. A struggle OS people have today.
Dw
Re: sponsoring of asf: fud or truth?
Posted by Lars Eilebrecht <la...@hyperreal.org>.
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 ...
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?
> 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 (?),
but you may want to read the bylaws and board minutes available at:
http://www.apache.org/foundation/bylaws.html
http://www.apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html
ciao...
--
Lars Eilebrecht
lars@hyperreal.org
Re: sponsoring of asf: fud or truth?
Posted by Chuck Murcko <ch...@topsail.org>.
On Tuesday, Jan 28, 2003, at 16:14 America/Phoenix, Roy T. Fielding
wrote:
> On Tuesday, January 28, 2003, at 01:06 PM, Greg Stein wrote:
>> On Tue, Jan 28, 2003 at 08:55:33AM -0500, Ben Hyde wrote:
>>> ...
>>>> 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.
>>
>> As a public charity, I believe they are required to be public. Roy
>> would
>> know the definitive answer (CC'd on this email).
>
> Not exactly. They are required to be available for IRS audit. A
> member
> of the public might be able to request a record, but that would be very
> strange. We've made a practice of recording them in the board meetings
> unless the donor requests anonymity (nobody has so far). The only
> significant financial donation has been from Siemens AG (Germany),
> with lesser amounts from ACM's software system award and Copyleft for
> t-shirts. The bulk of our funding (something like 70%) has come from
> past ApacheCon conferences.
>
There are also considerations for contributor privacy involved here.
Chuck
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Re: sponsoring of asf: fud or truth?
Posted by "Roy T. Fielding" <fi...@apache.org>.
On Tuesday, January 28, 2003, at 01:06 PM, Greg Stein wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 28, 2003 at 08:55:33AM -0500, Ben Hyde wrote:
>> ...
>>> 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.
>
> As a public charity, I believe they are required to be public. Roy
> would
> know the definitive answer (CC'd on this email).
Not exactly. They are required to be available for IRS audit. A member
of the public might be able to request a record, but that would be very
strange. We've made a practice of recording them in the board meetings
unless the donor requests anonymity (nobody has so far). The only
significant financial donation has been from Siemens AG (Germany),
with lesser amounts from ACM's software system award and Copyleft for
t-shirts. The bulk of our funding (something like 70%) has come from
past ApacheCon conferences.
....Roy
Re: sponsoring of asf: fud or truth?
Posted by Greg Stein <gs...@lyra.org>.
On Tue, Jan 28, 2003 at 08:55:33AM -0500, Ben Hyde wrote:
>...
> > 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.
As a public charity, I believe they are required to be public. Roy would
know the definitive answer (CC'd on this email).
Cheers,
-g
--
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/
Re: sponsoring of asf: fud or truth?
Posted by Ben Hyde <bh...@pobox.com>.
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