One of the biggest challenges facing the globe is the gap that exists in the wealth and standards of living enjoyed by the world's nations.
Brian Behlendorf
Foreign trade is not a replacement for foreign aid, of course, but foreign aid to a country that doesn't also engage in significant amounts of foreign trade is more likely to end up in the pockets of dictators and cronies.
I think the most that I've learned has been, how do I put this? The innate goodness inside of all of us.
Success for open source is when the term 'open source' becomes a non-factor in the decision making process, when people hear about Linux and compare it to Windows NT, and they compare it on the feature set and don't have much of an excuse not to use it.
So that's my main role right now and really the politics also includes going out and communicating to the world why Apache is a good thing, why companies should be involved in it, and why individuals should be involved in it too.
Certainly I get a lot personally out of it as well, there's the recognition and things like that but mostly I try to take that as an opportunity to explain why I hope we could see more projects like Apache out there and why it's a good thing for society.
And, I think that is actually appropriate because I'm really not the world's best programmer, I think it's a good thing that I'm not touching the code.
Corporations have been killing the risk-taking and exploration that makes software great. They have tried to rip the soul out of development.
Companies have been trying to figure out what it is that makes open source work.
I knew nothing about sales, marketing or how to run a company. Nor did I have a desire to do any of those things.
There is no better form of trade a developing nation can engage in than to sell services provided by an educated population.
Engineers in the developed world should be arguing not for protectionism but for trade agreements that seek to establish rules that result in a real rise in living standards. This will ensure that outsourcing is a positive force in the developing nation's economy and not an exploitative one.
What's kept Java from being used as widely as possible is there hasn't been an Open Source implementation of it that's gotten really widespread use.
No one wants one language. There are applications when it's appropriate to write something in C rather than in Java. If you want to write something where performance is much more important than extensibility, then you might want to choose C rather than Java.
I won't sit here and say an Open Source project will do things faster than a closed source, but one of the reasons why is that it sits on a whole lot of things that came before it.
Software as an asset isn't stable over time; it needs to be maintained.
I'm not of the opinion that all software will be open source software. There is certain software that fits a niche that is only useful to a particular company or person: for example, the software immediately behind a web site's user interface. But the vast majority of software is actually pretty generic.
In true open source development, there's lots of visibility all the way through the development process.
