[JDEV] Jabber.com / Webb financials

[David Waite]

Now it is time for me to get in trouble :)

I would say it is more mis-phrased. The meat of the question is 'with
one company sponsoring so much of the development, how would things
react to a sudden retraction of those sponsorships?'

Basically that comes down to 'who wants to see the project succeed',
would another company want to come along and provide the level of
sponsorship that is currently being provided by Jabber.com / Webb, how
would the developent be impacted by many of the core developers  no
longer being paid for their Jabber work.

I do not think that a project with the demand of Jabber *could* deny in
this way. Some company or another group of individuals would pick up the
slack, whether one company providing sponsorship fell off the earth, or
half of the core developers were killed in a plane crash. Of course, I
cannot back this up any more than I could guarantee a Linux 2.6.0 coming
out if Linus was hit by a bus.

Probably the best advice I could give about sponsorship is to ignore it.
For instance, do not think of me as David Waite, employee of Jabber.com
and core developer (*not* end user , grin).. think of me as David Waite,
active developer. If my job ended, there is nothing preventing me from
getting another job and either actively participating in Jabber
development for them. Even if that was not my position, I would still do
as much development as I could in my free time.

We are not a group of companies arguing over product direction, but
developers interested in features coming out. If you start to really
think of development in terms of 'Company X wants this, this and this in
our 1.4 release' and not 'So-and-so would like to work on this and that
feature', you are limiting who can provide valid input to the project,
and destroying a lot of the community surrounding Open Source which,
quite frankly, makes it appealing to develop on. Its the difference
between working with people for a cool idea, and openly sharing the
source code for your company's next product.

- David Waite

Peter Saint-Andre wrote:

> Now *here's* a topic that's not quite right for the JDEV list.... :)
>
> Peter
>
> --
> Peter Saint-Andre
> stpeter at jabber.org
>
> Venus Zamoyta wrote:
> >
> > Howdy,
> >
> > I was just checking out Yahoo financials for Webb
> > Interactive and it looks like they're out of money.
> > They had $9M cash in October, losing about $16M /
> > quarter.  http://biz.yahoo.com/p/w/webb.html
> >
> > The last press release on Webb's site is dated
> > 12/1/00, so it looks like no major funding has come
> > through.  (no funding is mentioned on Jabber.com press
> > releases)
> >
> > Where's funding coming from?
> >
> > Are we prepared for a move back to an un-funded open
> > source project?
>
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