Interviewed: * Zack Urlocker of MySQL. [status: interviewed] * Louis Suárez-Potts of OpenOffice Ask especially about OpenOffice project sponsor motivations. [status: interviewed] Possibl other interviewees: * Zak Greant, formerly of MySQL. [status: emailed, no answer yet] * Keith Bostic of Sleepycat For comparison with MySQL, mainly. I don't think Sleepycat has the same kind of outside dev community that MySQL does... Or does MySQL, even? [status: not contacted yet] * Michael Tiemann of RedHat. [status: responded positively, but out this week, so contact him on Friday Dec. 10th about an interview the week after] * Danese Cooper of Sun. [status: emailed CollabNet first, no answer yet] * Brian Behlendorf Especially, run the "types of projects" list by him, ask him if he would add any, and see if he can come up with examples for each kind. [status: contacted, but no date set] * Jon Trowbridge of Novell Not sure how deeply involved he is in business discussions. But maybe he knows someone at Novell who is? [status: not asked yet, will see him Wednesday Dec. 8th, though] Questions/Topics to start off the discussion: * What is the business model, or business models, by which open source is seen as a worthwhile investment? Some models are: + Dual-licensing (but how do they handle contributed code?) + Service sales + Hardware sales + Undercut a competitor + Internal infrastructure dependence + What else? * Did you start the project(s), or did you join an existing project? * How in general would you characterize the relationship between the corporation and the volunteer community? Harmonious? Divisive? Some of both? * What is the ratio between salaried and non-salaried developers? (But make sure not to compare apples with oranges.) What about _contribution_ ratios? Do equally large and complex contributions come from all sources? * Do you have competitors paying their own developers on the same projects? Do you sense divided loyalties -- from them or from your own people? * Have you ever had serious disagreement on the technical direction of the project between influential dev community people and the company? How was it resolved? * Did you ever face a serious fork threat? Cause one? Did a fork actually happen? * How much of the corporation's OSS strategy is made public? To what degree does the dev community think of itself as part of that strategy? * Did open source involvement make it hard to keep corporate strategy confidential? Did this force the company to adopt a different policy on confidentiality than it otherwise would have? * Curiosity: Have a corporate position on software patents? * Internal resistance/reservations about open source involvement? (Understandable if can't answer fully, though.) * How integrated are non-developmental resources integrated with the public project? Say, the QA team, or the documentation team? * Secrecy of contracts? How often, for how long? Just identity is secret, or technical details, or even existence of the contract? ## Local Variables: ## coding:utf-8 ## End: ## vim:encoding=utf8