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Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2011 21:14:08 -0500
From: "William A. Rowe Jr." <wrowe@apache.org>
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To: community@apache.org
Subject: Re: Liberal corporate open source policies
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On 3/22/2011 7:19 PM, Keith Curtis wrote:
> 
> I guess some might consider a solution like that no worse than any other but I think
> endorsing such a stack goes against a good policy. If you are going to make a policy, you
> should love the results it endorses. That is all I was trying to suggest.

See, I guess that's where I think this discussion has gone off the rails
for an Apache Software Foundation discussion.

In large measure, ASF participants are pragmatists.  This isn't a culture
you might find in the Gnome or other FSF projects which seek to win an
entirely free (as in beer) ecosystem.  Linus himself is exempted from
this gross over-generalization, as he does not come down against allowing
vendors to interface closed source with his kernel or running his kernel
on top of closed systems, so I'd place him in this same pragmatist culture.

The ASF itself for its infrastructure runs mostly atop FreeBSD, with some
Linux, Solaris, and Windows in this mix, mostly sliced by VMware for the
virtual boxes in combination with Solaris zones.  Of course much of the
software that the infra team hosts is OSS, but not exclusively.  And in
the ultimate nod to pragmatism, the ASF is happy to run donated software
in lieu of purchasing licenses.

You might find this is orthogonal to our public letter to Sun with respect
to Java, the TCK and the Apache Harmony project.  But this was not; the
letter simply sought the terms promised by Sun and their compliance to the
JSPA which Sun authored.  Had those promises and JSPA contract not existed,
the ASF would have been just as likely to never attempt the Harmony project,
yet it was still developing code in Java.

The ASF still publishes open source which runs on proprietary languages
(Java) and proprietary operating systems (Solaris, Windows) without any
apologies or remorse.  Advocacy for open source and/or completely open
solutions is fine, but the two are not identical.  And until there is
an open chipset design for their target architecture, the "entirely 100%
open solution" champions are being disingenuous, IMHO :)

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