I was at the Apachecon US 2009 from 2-6 November 2009. Lot of inspirations. A lot of thoughts of doing something for the community and guess what, I’m now stronger on how much money OpenSource involves..! The conference’s platinum sponsors was Microsoft. I’m not astound because Microsoft also funds the foundation since long time! Many don’t know this!
Apache and Microsoft have been working quite closely. Both on a win-win situation. Microsoft treats Apache as their technical research and Apache treats Microsoft as a support for building and taking technologies to another level. This is one collaboration which I really like.. Any open source foundation if backed by a Big Fish is a major success. Most committers are on a job in their respective companies and working dedicated for Apache! Why? Because the company they work for uses apache products heavily
The event was a 2 day Barcamp & 3 day ApacheCon together. 2-6 November at Marriott Conventional Center , City Center of Oakland. Oakland is pretty cheap compared to San Francisco. Nothing much to see here apart from a good lake(which I missed). You might want to avoid going to West Oakland. Google for “How not to get shot in Oakland”.
The conference had speakers and committers from all around the globe. For those of you who don’t know who a committer. He is a person who will do the actual release and commit the code. Contributers from anywhere can submit code and patches, Its the job of a committer to do the release. There are more than 5-6 committers per project. At least 2-3 committers should review one another’s code and agree to the release of the code so that the release is watched by more than a single eye!
A good project in apache has a good adoption rate. For example Apache Tomcat for Java servlet has a 10,000 downloads per day! And the figures are like this and increasing over the last two years! Now that’s something cool.. ain’t it?
Its the 10th year of the Foundation. Apache has grown to a full scale Open Source foundation which has not only proved that Open source works! , but its processes and operations has made a mark on how an organization should run. Hats Off to you guys! Everything is very process oriented in Apache. They have very formal structure like any other company, but with a major touch of community development.
After all , social networking and community development is all that matters in the end.
Here are some pictures from my trip.
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