On Jan 25, 2013, at 4:13 AM, Benson Margulies wrote: > On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 3:04 AM, Mattmann, Chris A (388J) > <chris.a.mattm...@jpl.nasa.gov> wrote: >> Hi Benson, >> >> On 1/24/13 7:23 PM, "Benson Margulies" <bimargul...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> It's unfortunate to have this conversation in parallel here and on >>> https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-157. >>> >>> Also, this thread is a combo of the discussion of ordinary >>> jars-of-classes (where I'd forgotten the policy) and the much more >>> tangled question of models, which is what the JIRA is wrestling with. >>> >>> To answer Ted, I think that Roy might write something like: >>> >>> "It's not the mission of the ASF to create complete, >>> end-user-friendly, software products. It's our mission to create open >>> source code. If someone else wants to build up an end-user-friendly >>> aggregation of ASF code and models from bombs of whatever, that's >>> great, and we encourage them." >> >> What about Apache OpenOffice? > > I asked this question about Open Office, and I got, more or less, what > I typed in above. I was puzzled, but there you have it. As I recall, > Roy made a remark like 'our real users are people who will take the > source of Open Office ...'.
The Apache Software Foundation is not a retail software company. We foster an ecosystem, and do our best not to shoot ourselves in the foot by directly competing with commercial interests and killing the ecosystem in the process. Please don't confuse the development community with the end-user community. They are not even remotely the same things. There is nothing preventing folks in the development community from providing the best support available, for the most polished binary releases, for folks who only care about "open source" as a fashion statement. They can even do so using our infrastructure, if they are part of our development team. It just isn't the ASF doing so -- it is some person or company doing so. Yes, being user friendly has a huge value for the projects. So what? We have to leave something for others to do. And I did mention, many times over, that the *right* way to handle openoffice.org was to manage the user-facing site separately from the development organization, with separate nonprofits if necessary, particularly since then the user-facing site could host all of the OO distributions without busting our brand. ....Roy --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
