TechFundu

There was a blog posted in apache website on April 1, 2010 with same title. Blog literally made many techies sweating over possible future of hundreds of ASF projects.  There were 80 comments on that blog.  Of course many of the reader took it as april fool prank but still many became april fool..

Some of these interesting comments are:

1.) It means that all IP is transferred to Oracle. Any libraries/software licensed under the GPL will continue to be available, but newer versions will be licensed under some dual license scheme for commercial users. Or so I hear. 

2.) Splitting 1.5B among the about 300 ASF members (committers won't qualify, right?) gives 5M per person, so I guess many of those people won't need to work anymore, or at least not for a long time. This might mean a slowdown for those projects that are driven not by passion but by a need to make a living. Not sure if that's good or bad.

3.) Interesting. I think most folks who contributed code to Apache projects did so with the intention of it being free and open for everyone. Now that this has been compromised, it shows that there was no real contractual commitment on Apache's part to uphold this, even if contributors had to sign an agreement. I realize now this means that Apache can profit off of our contributions, with contributors not getting any share. Perhaps this is the end of truly "free" open source software. It's a sad world...though perhaps not for Microsoft who pointed out earlier on that there's no such thing as "free".

4.) Can you confirm the rumors that the deal was done with ORCL only after talks to sell Apache's IP rights to the web and everything on it broke down between the ASF and SCO? Now the ASF is part of a public company we have a right to know!

5.) Sounds good on the surface, but I am concerned about the new licensing. Will everyone using ASF code for commercial uses or distributing it as part of a product one day find themselves having to fork over Big Bucks in licensing fees? Current code is probably safe from this, but what about new versions produced sometime in the future? Hmm...

6.) I don't know, first ORACLE goes after MYSQL (i think with clever idea -sun purchase MYSQL the ORACLE purchase SUN -, now ASF, i think ORACLE is planning something BIG like kill open software, in the future they can close projects or just declare that every one must purchase a liscense (like with solaris), is this the end of open and software???

7.) Does the Intellectual Property include the genes of any of the ASF members?