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
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.
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.
Companies have been trying to figure out what it is that makes open source work.
We've made a lot of claims about what we can do, now we issue a challenge to analysts to go and figure out a way to measure it.
What we were trying to do here is to find a consensus that this was a good direction to go in and that there weren't any fundamental problems, and I think we pretty much agreed on that.
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.
There is no better form of trade a developing nation can engage in than to sell services provided by an educated population.
Software as an asset isn't stable over time; it needs to be maintained.
In true open source development, theres lots of visibility all the way through the development process.
Engineers in the developed world should be arguing not for protectionism but for trade agreements that seek to establish rules that result in a real rise in living standards. This will ensure that outsourcing is a positive force in the developing nations economy and not an exploitative one.
Certainly I get a lot personally out of it as well, there's the recognition and things like that but mostly I try to take that as an opportunity to explain why I hope we could see more projects like Apache out there and why it's a good thing for society.