Re: Corporations and the incubator

On 24 Dec 2005, at 21:00, Martin Sebor wrote:

> Press releases are a means for companies to announce noteworthy
> events to the public. Certainly, donating a substantial code base
> and committing to maintaining and typically also supporting that
> code base free of charge while at the same time taking on the task
> of building a diverse community around the donated project and
> shepherding it through the incubation process is a noteworthy
> event and can be a significant financial undertaking on the part
> of the donating organization that the public has the right to know
> about.

Snif. "the right to know about"

IMHO, actually very _few_ companies issue PR around their ASF
involvement, considering the fact that the ASF biosphere is one of a
myriad of tiny (one-person), small (a few people), and then larger
companies employing individuals which contribute to ASF projects, quite
a few of them during company hours.

Just for starters, crosscheck the affiliations listed on
http://www.apache.org/foundation/members.html against a PR News search
tool. And that's only ASF members.

Are the companies not issuing PR lazy asses, or plain dumb? Not willing
to inform the public?

> And they do -- their software :)

Sorry to say, but: big deal. Compare that with the value of the ASF
brand for the donating entity. Lines of code are a side-effect of
developer team-work, and it's much more difficult to grow a team and a
brand than to actually code.

</Steven>
--
Steven Noels                            http://outerthought.org/
Outerthought                              Open Source Java & XML
stevenn at outerthought.org                stevenn at apache.org


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