From tim@oreilly.com Mon Jan 31 10:17:25 2000 Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 15:35:09 -0800 From: Tim O'Reilly Reply-To: new-httpd@apache.org To: new-httpd@apache.org, larry@wall.org, merlyn@stonehenge.com, brian@collab.net, allen@oreilly.com, dale@oreilly.com Subject: Correction message sent to Gartner Ken Coar brought to my attention the incorrect assertions in a recent Gartner report. Just wanted to let you know that I have sent them the following correction. Hopefully, they'll do something about it. (Randal--you might want to forward this to clpm and p5p; Brian, I've sent it to new-httpd@apache, since it was the discussion there that brought it to my attention. If you want to forward it to other apache lists, feel free.) (I suppose that we could put something up on our site as well.) Here's the message that I sent to Gartner: In your report at http://gartner12.gartnerweb.com/public/static/hotc/hc00085832.html, you make an erroneous statement regarding my company and its relationship to Perl and Apache: "Note 3 OSS and Commercial Support The Apache and PERL projects are maintained in large part by full-time employees of O'Reilly and Associates. Red Hat (as a consequence of its Cygnus acquisition) is the primary maintainer of the GNU C/C++ compiler that is essential to most OSS projects. Finally, even established IT vendors such as IBM are active participants in the OSS community; IBM has ported Apache to the AS/400 platform." While it is true that Larry Wall, the original author of Perl, is on the O'Reilly staff as a kind of "open source fellow", and continues to direct the evolution of Perl from that position, it is completely untrue that "PERL projects are maintained in large part by full-time employees of O'Reilly and Associates." Larry himself does little or no coding any more; the core language of Perl is developed via a mailing list called perl5-porters; it has over a hundred members, from individual consultants, to university staff, to employees of proprietary and open source companies. The coordinator for the upcoming release, Gurusamy Sarathy, works for Vancouver-based Perl company ActiveState, but even Sarathy is coordinating input from a large independent developer team, not doing all the work himself. And even beyond the core language, the robust growth of Perl is happening in new modules, which are submitted to CPAN (the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) by many hundreds of independent developers. Similarly, while O'Reilly briefly employed Apache co-founder Brian Behlendorf as a kind of "entrepreneur in residence" while he developed the business plan for his new venture, Collab.net (in which O'Reilly remains a major shareholder), the Apache Group itself has no relationship to O'Reilly. Apache development is controlled by the Apache Software Foundation, which coordinates the activities of a group of dozens of core developers, plus several related project teams (see jakarta.apache.org and xml.apache.org). Please correct the misinformation in your report. -- Tim O'Reilly @ O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. 101 Morris Street, Sebastopol, CA 95472 +1 707-829-0515, FAX +1 707-829-0104 tim@oreilly.com, http://www.oreilly.com -- ask bjoern hansen - more than 60M impressions per day, To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message