Apache Conference 2007: Day 2

by hjanssen on May 03, 2007 07:01pm

Here we are, day two of the Apache Conference in Amsterdam.

I have been attending less tracks today, I seem to be ending up talking to a lot of people.

It is very enjoyable to see the reaction when I tell people that I am from Microsoft, and I work at the open source software lab at Microsoft.

So far nothing but positive reactions to me being there.

I had the pleasure of talking with, among others, Lars Eilebrecht, Roy Fielding and William Rowe. They are of course very active in the core foundation. Very enjoyable, and there seems to be synergy for future collaborations.

Okay, before I go into what all took place today, I wanted to finish up yesterday’s events. And I am going to severely reduce my long winded writing (yeah right).

Two tracks I went to that were of interest yesterday were ‘ mod_rewrite’, which finally had some more technical content in it. I would love to see more of these talks. How and when to use which mod_*.

The second one was given by Rebecca Hansen of Sun Microsystems. She talked about ‘Best practices for incorporating open source code in Commercial Production’. I did not think she spent that much time on what the subject seems to imply. Much more time was spent talking about how Open Source is now viable and you can and should switch to it because large companies are now going to provide you support and services for it; so you will be safe using it.

She also said that companies are much more willing to pay for support to get what they want instead of paying for a license and being stuck with a product.

I have to say that these comments where met with some skepticism from the audience. And the questions that followed clearly showed this.

General audience response was that they are very well aware that OSS exists because of a community, not because of a company.   So without the community there is no product/service. Which made the statement that you now can switch to open source because large companies will provide you service on the community software is kind of odd.  Several people I spoke with afterwards seemed to share my views of it.

I think there is a place for service orientated opportunities for companies. But they better realize that without a healthy community for the projects they are trying to provide service to there is no business opportunity.   Community comes first.

Okay I will write some more about what happened today. But I ended up talking to a lot of people and did not attend all the tracks I set out to.  And since it is late here on the other side of the planet, I am stopping here for today.

Till tomorrow.

Well, at least it is a little shorter this time :)