Brian Behlendorf
Brian Behlendorf
Brian Behlendorfis a technologist, executive, computer programmer, and an important figure in the open-source software movement. He was a primary developer of the Apache Web server, the most popular web server software on the Internet, and a founding member of the Apache Group, which later became the Apache Software Foundation. Behlendorf served as President of the Foundation for three years. Behlendorf has served on the board of the Mozilla Foundation since 2003 , Benetech since 2009 and the Electronic Frontier...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth30 March 1973
CountryUnited States of America
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.
I don't get a chance to code any more.
On the Apache server the core team duties are distributed among 20 or so people, but only six to eight are active at any point in time.
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.
I knew nothing about sales, marketing or how to run a company. Nor did I have a desire to do any of those things.
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.
Corporations have been killing the risk-taking and exploration that makes software great. They have tried to rip the soul out of development.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Companies have been trying to figure out what it is that makes open source work.