Some people see the choice of open-source licence is important to a project's success, so which licence does Outerthought release its code under? "Both projects are under a BSD-like licence, which is based on the Apache Licence. This means that credit has to be given to us, so people can fork the code or use it in a commercial application, but they have to make clear that they've used some of our code to their customers."
This wasn't necessarily driven by Noels' and his colleagues' involvement in Apache, though. "This was more of a gut feeling. I see many companies going for the LGPL model, because of a fear of forking. I think trying to avoid forking of your project has more to do with how you manage your project and its community. If you manage it well and you're keen on integrating patches and additions from outside, forks are not likely to happen. Using the LGPL licence seems to be based more on distrust towards other developers using your code, whereas we say in the end if they have in-depth questions, real support needs they are going to come back to us. We designed and wrote the code, and that's more important than which licence we use to distribute it. If someone wants to fork our code and they have deep enough pockets there's no way we can stop them anyway".
Noels says getting involved with the Apache Software Foundation wasn't so much a deliberate action as just a progression. "It happened without much strategy. The initial interest was technological -- I was looking for something which was capable of XML publishing, and I eventually was confronted with Cocoon. That was a long time ago, and I started helping, discussing, and contributing little bits of code. I really felt grateful to the people who were involved at that time that they considered me to be one of their peers. It felt good -- having invoices paid by customers feels good as well, but having some smarter guys saying "we like what you contribute, come and be one of us", that's very important".
Working on code as part of a non-profit organisation brings a different, and possibly more satisfying, way of working. "Being able to reflect on things without customer pressure behind it is also very important. We can ask questions, we can have issues with customers -- technological issues -- that we can reflect on with code developers, without having to think about business interests".
Noels also feels there are other benefits to participating in open-source development in general: "For small companies it's a way to expand your horizons in a sense. It started with one project, which was Cocoon, and from then on it grew organically. You find out that you care a lot about licensing, you care a lot about what new projects get added to the foundation, so you start discussing these issues on mailing lists, and thinking out loud. Eventually these people say "we might as well let him in rather than try to defuse his energy", so that's the logical progression from becoming a committer to a PMC member to a foundation member. It's just because you care about it -- it's a people thing".
Noels even gets a certain level of personal satisfaction from his work with the ASF. "It's kind of cool to be able to speak on a first-name basis with guys like [ASF Founder] Brian Behlendorf, who get interviewed by Fortune Magazine! Knowing that you're on the same mailing list, you care about the same issues, you're able to read what he's thinking on the legal aspects and the community aspects is great. There's a great deal of experience between the members of the Apache foundation. Just being able to tap into this is personally very enriching".
Having to fund such involvement is much trickier. Noels finds that working with other developers involved in the same open-source projects is a great help. "In our situation it helps that we're all involved in Cocoon. We all have commit access to Cocoon. The time I contribute to the foundation and to Cocoon is effectively funded by my colleagues, and that helps a lot, that I'm not totally independent and I have two colleagues, who make sure we can spend work time on free software".
Not that he finds its only people working for small companies like his who contribute: "If you look at Apache contributors there's a mix between people who are completely independent, people who work for large companies, and lots of small shops working on Apache projects".
Noels feels that his involvement with the ASF has been one of the main reasons his experiences with open-source software have been so positive. "You spend time doing some things for free because you know in the end it could be a good long-term investment. We would never be able to reap the benefits of open-source software if we had been working completely on our own. Just opening up a project and putting it on SourceForge wouldn't have worked -- it was working with Apache that made it easier for us, and made it easier for us to contribute back to Apache".
