We have a lot of developers working for us.

[rb...@covalent.net]

I thought this was good for a laugh.


>From http://www.prospect.org/controversy/open_source/raymond-e-2.html

Eric Raymonds round 2 on the question "Should Public Policy Support
Open-Source Software?":

A paradigm of this shift is the history of the Apache web server. In its
origins, it was the NCSA [National Center for Supercomputing
Applications] web server, developed by graduate students associated with
a government-funded supercomputing facility. Today, by contrast, the 
forty-odd full-time developers in the Apache Software Foundation mostly
collect corporate salaries, without compromise to its free and open
license. Nor are other examples difficult to find. Development of the X
window system, the basic engine for graphics in the open-source world,
was initiated as academic research but funded over most of its lifetime
by a commercial consortium.  


Can all 40-odd Full-Time developers please stand up?  I lost count of the
FULL-TIME people around ten.  :-)

Good to know we give the impression of being more people than we are.  :-)


Ryan

_______________________________________________________________________________
Ryan Bloom                        	rbb@apache.org
406 29th St.
San Francisco, CA 94131
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: We have a lot of developers working for us.

[Tom Harrington <tp...@crosstor.com>]

rbb@covalent.net wrote:
> 
> I thought this was good for a laugh.
> 
> >From http://www.prospect.org/controversy/open_source/raymond-e-2.html
> 
> Eric Raymonds round 2 on the question "Should Public Policy Support
> Open-Source Software?":
> 
> A paradigm of this shift is the history of the Apache web server. In its
> origins, it was the NCSA [National Center for Supercomputing
> Applications] web server, developed by graduate students associated with
> a government-funded supercomputing facility. Today, by contrast, the
> forty-odd full-time developers in the Apache Software Foundation mostly
> collect corporate salaries, without compromise to its free and open
> license. Nor are other examples difficult to find. Development of the X
> window system, the basic engine for graphics in the open-source world,
> was initiated as academic research but funded over most of its lifetime
> by a commercial consortium.
> 
> Can all 40-odd Full-Time developers please stand up?  I lost count of the
> FULL-TIME people around ten.  :-)

I'd suggest that the error is not so much the "...forty-odd full-time
developers..." bit (though I have no idea what the real number is) as
it is the "...in the Apache Software Foundation..." part.  I don't belong
to ASF but I do spend most of my working hours these days hacking Apache
code.  Unfortunately my changes are unlikely to make it back to ASF,
but they're all OS-specific, and for our business model it doesn't make
much difference anyway.  And while this means I won't contribute 
_directly_ to Apache in the form of patches, it does support ESR's
point in that ultimately I'll be expanding the Apache user base as
a result of private commercial funding.

-- 
Tom Harrington
CrosStor Software, Inc.
tph@crosstor.com