Re: Companies Contributing to Open Source

On Wed, 2006-12-20 at 09:51 +1300, Andrej Ricnik-Bay wrote:
> On 12/20/06, Joshua D. Drake <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> wrote:
>
> > O.k. in all Bruce I like your article but I must admit it seems to take
> > a "The community is god" perspective and that we must all bend to the
> > will of said community.
> I'm not really in a position to judge how a company thinks about
> "donating resources" to a project, but I certainly think that Bruce'
> standpoint is correct, and that the community is *indeed* the driver of
> a project; if a company doesn't like how the community deals with
> their requirements/needs they can just maintain their own branch.

It is definitely a tough distinction. My first thought on reply was that
well a companies employees become members of the community but that
reinforces what you say above.

I think my overall thought is the tone seems a bit non-gracious to
companies, when IMO the community should be actively courting companies
to give resources. If companies feel unwelcome, they won't give.

>
>
> > The community could learn a great deal from adopting some of the more
> > common business practices when it comes to development as well.
> >
> > In short, I guess I think it is important to recognize that both are
> > partners in the open source world and that to ignore one over the other
> > is destined to fail.
> Do you have any statistical data to back that hypothesis?

Of which, the community learning or my take that if we ignore one over
the other it is destined to fail?

I don't really want to bring up the first point as it has been hashed
over and over. It lends to the project management, todo list, milestone
debacle :)

The second point is that if the community ignores the company trying to
give resources, the company is likely to ignore the community and thus
we both fail (and vice versa).

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drkae

>
> > Sincerely,
> >
> > Joshua D. Drake
> Cheers,
> Andrej
>
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