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I have not been involved in this discussion for now, but I wanted to give my 2 paise (Indian cents) based on what I know of the 'corporate mind'. I am still speaking as an individual here.

Right now, as I see it, there is a big problem for anyone who wants to contribute anything: which code base? how much work will I have to do for my patches to work on both trees? Is there a point?

Besides that, here are some things about 'corporates' (= non-technical managers) that may hurt LO if the community stays fragmented. Maybe your corporates are more enlightened, but not everyone is.

1) Corporates really love 'SPOCs': Single Point of Contacts... in other words, having only one interlocutor keep things simple. Having a fragmented community is really going to hurt corporate contributions in my opinion.

2) Corporates rely on 'name dropping' a bit too much.
If one is stuck having to pick a project, the suit will ask him 'who is supporting that?'. OOo has IBM. IBM still has a glowing aura from the days of yore that shouldn't be under-estimated.
Oh, and did I mention that Apache has brand recognition?

3) Corporates don't understand that FLOSS communities recognize individuals, not organizations. They'd like to have a stake/control the project to some degree

4) Corporates don't know the difference between open source licenses. For them, all open source is the same. So telling them that LO offers licenses that better protect the users' rights than ASF is NOT going to be a selling point.

The community is NOT going to benefit from a split at all. And unless there is something clearly laid out for for cooperation between ASF and LO, my thinking is that we won't have as much corporate involvement as we could have. Some full-time developers could help a lot.


Marc-André Laverdière
Software Security Scientist
Innovation Labs, Tata Consultancy Services
Hyderabad, India

On 06/09/2011 12:11 AM, Greg Stein wrote:
On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 14:04, BRM<bm_witness@yahoo.com>  wrote:
...
I'm quite pleased to see the ASF members (at least here) not taking offense but
continuing to act very diplomatically throughout all of this. (That said, I
haven't paid nearly as much attention to the Apache Mailing Lists.)

There is certainly a good bit of defensiveness from Apache people over
on the other list. Just kind of the nature of things.

I'm just looking forward to a vote on the danged podling so that we
can start getting "real work" done. Most of the discussion has died
down now.

Cheers,
-g


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