On Wednesday, August 6, 2003, at 07:06 AM, Jack Frosch wrote:
Open source projects typically solve a problem not addressed by commercial vendors, even if the problem is just the price being charged for the commercial solution. Yet we already have a very popular, open-source J2EE container in JBoss.
Why must people's egos get in the way of common sense in our business as in so many? Like Microsoft, it appears that Apache.org just wants to control everything - and that's just such a lamentable motivation, whether held by Microsoft or Apache.org.
How about swallowing your pride, giving up your aspirations of controlling every popular, open-source, significant project, and just embrace JBoss with support, MBean development, etc.?
Frankly, I'm just dismayed by the Geronimo project and the pettiness of the egos driving Apache.org.
I think this is a very good question. I believe the answer lies not in copyrights or ownership, but in community. Apache is a place where communities are grown and fostered. The products of these simply exist for all to use in whatever way they wish. Apache does not rely on ownership or copyright to hold a community together, yet somehow our communities hold together despite disagreements, losing key contributors, forking, or other such things. I do not believe our communities would hold together if there were a better alternative way to reach the same goal.
One thing you mentioned, control, is a common misconception of Apache projects. Apache projects do not exist to exert control, they exist to provide a minimum common platform of functionality available to all at no cost (economic or social). We don't tell anyone how they must use our code, nor do we expect anything in return. Again, this is a crucial distinction between our products and other proprietary or more-restrictive products. We rely on our community to produce excellent code in order to maintain our popularity.
Let me turn the tables a bit: Do you think Apache can create a J2EE product that will dominate the market by means other than product excellence? (In other words, do you see something inherently wrong with a competitive J2EE landscape?)
-aaron
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