Apache Foundation and corporate engagement

As I remember the story, back
in the late 1990’s IBM, seeing a need for a http server for the rapidly
developing internet market, looked at a couple of alternatives, developing one
in-house or adopting the http server developed at the National Center
for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).  The NCSA http server project
had been terminated at the NCSA, but the http server continued to
be supported by a group of eight developers.  As I remember it IBM decided that it would be more cost effective and would make
more sense from a market perspective to adopt what was the de facto
industry standard.  But IBM insisted that for this to work there had to
be a legal entity with which IBM as a corporation could commercially and
and legally engage.  And so on March 25, 1999, the Apache Software Foundation
was formed and the rest is history.   IBM and ultimately many others
adopted and distribute the Apache server.  As of September 2012 it was
estimated that  Apache serves about 55% of all active websites.  From an
industry perspective adopting the Apache server was a much more
cost-effective alternative than if HP, Oracle, IBM, Sun, and others had
each developed their own http server.

OSGEO

Back
in 2005/2006 I was working with Dave McIlhagga to interest
Autodesk in becoming a corporate sponsor of open source geospatial
software, and I saw a similar scenario played out.  It seemed to many of us
that it would be more cost-effective for companies to share web-mapping
software infrastructure rather than each develop its own web mapping
server.  At that point there was already well-developed and well-known
open source geospatial projects whose code was being used all over the
world.  The best known examples were the University of Minnesota’s
MapServer project and Frank Warnerdam’s GDAL geo-imagery libraries.
 Again Autodesk insisted that there had to be a legal entity with which
as a corporation it could engage.  The Open Source Geospatial Foundation
(OSGEO) was modeled loosely on the Apache Foundation and was founded in
March, 2006 with Autodesk as the major sponsor.  The OSGEO has been incredibly successful.  It has grown
rapidly to support 25 or so projects, some in incubation,  20 chapters worldwide, and a
national conference, FOSS4G, which last year in Denver attracted about
900 participants.

The next step

As a recent article
has pointed out, 15 years ago when open source was just beginning, the
discussion was focussed on the total cost of open source vs proprietary,
alternative open source business models, and open source as an
alternative to monopolistic proprietary.

Since
then open source has come a long way.  One of the most important
developments is the rise of the open source foundation driven by the
need for corporate engagement.   These non profit legal entities offer
projects important benefits that are difficult for a project to fund on
its own.

• A host for managing fiscal and intellectual property shared resources such as trademarks and shared copyrights
• An employer for staff serving the community and project
• A guarantor and enabler for governance
• An infrastructure provider
• A liability firewall for community participants

Two examples of such foundations are the Apache Software Foundation and the Eclipse Foundation.
These foundation encourage trust in the long term stability of the
projects they support and, most importantly for enterprise software, they
encourage corporate participation.

The
other major development is in the area of licensing.  The Open Source
Initiative (OSI) lists 69 different licenses that range from the Gnu
Public License (GPL) to the very liberal MIT/BSD style licences.  Recent
years have seen the development of licences in the middle ground that
are designed to be business friendly, in particular to allow mixing of
open source and proprietary modules.  The Eclipse Public Licence (EPL)
is an example of such as licence and is a critical reason that large
corporations such as IBM and Oracle are important supporters of the
Eclipse Foundation.

LocationTech

There
is a pent up interest for geospatially enabling enterprise information
technology. For open source projects interested in encouraging adoption
and support from vendors in this area, doing business implies corporate
engagement with companies such as IBM, Oracle, and other major IT
vendors.

A
number of people advocating for open source geospatial software have
seen the need for services and facilitates to enable corporate
engagement. In my view, the type of projects that are seeking corporate
engagement would be attracted to the Eclipse Foundation. The Eclipse
Foundation provides services to reduce friction for organizations to
re-use and contribute to open source projects. This supports
business developing products and services that depend upon open source
and in turn, the open source projects benefit from re-use, investment,
and increased credibility.

Based
on this thinking Andrew Ross, well known for his work in a variety of
open source communities, initiated what is now officially known as the Eclipse Foundation LocationTech Working Group along with a team of representatives from notable companies and open source projects.  In
my and others view. the LocationTech Working Group fills an important
gap in the enterprise geospatial market.  A close relationship between
OSGEO and LocationTech is advantageous to the broad open source community because they are both serving the community, but in different, complementary
ways.