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InformationWeek: Open-Source Software: Who Gives And Who Takes?

“Chase Phillips used to spend up to 100 hours a week writing
code for the Firefox browser. Bruce Momjian, a former teacher,
manages the E-mail list for contributors to the PostgreSQL
database. Brian McCallister spends evenings and weekends working on
projects for the Apache Software Foundation. Swedish engineer Peter
Lundblad labors over Subversion, a change management system for
distributed development, at night ‘when the children are sleeping
and my wife watches TV.’

“This spirit of volunteerism is alive and well in the world of
open source software. Thousands of people donate their time and
expertise to the benefit of all. But not everyone is giving as much
as they’re getting. Large companies, those with the greatest
wherewithal to help, are surprisingly minor players in the
roll-up-your-sleeves work of open source development…”


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