What Apple has not grasped or has dismissed is the spirit of free software, which is that we form a community to cooperate on the software. The initiative gives away the code for Java and Jini but requires developers to pay Sun when they ship products based on that code. It seems that some developers are unhappy with the conditions Sun places on licensees. 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. Most other projects are somewhere in between and I actually don't think a single project could do well with a huge number of 'core team' members.
Open source does have certain practical benefits for large software companies.
Chris Nelson of Mozillazine has documented a number of outside hackers who have added functionality to Mozilla, like XML support, and more enhancements are on the way. More than a thousand people have downloaded Sun's Java code, potentially adding to the Java brain trust. When Netscape finally releases Communicator 5, proponents say, the input of outside developers will be apparent with support for a half-dozen or more new technologies, as well as software versions for various operating systems that might otherwise have been hard for Netscape to support right off the bat. But given the roundly positive reviews that greeted Microsoft's release of Internet Explorer 5 last week, Mozilla probably needs all the help it can get. All Rights Reserved.