“In 1994, when Brian Behlendorf took on the task of setting
up the HotWired Web server, he was an idealistic young programmer
straight out of UC Berkeley. In the five years since then, he and
the other members of the Apache Group (now the Apache Software
Foundation) created one of the great Open Source success stories –
Apache, the most popular Web server in existence. Now he’s
teamed up with O’Reilly & Associates to found sourceXchange, a
marketplace where Open Source developers and sponsors of paid Open
Source projects can connect. Will it work? Will it scale? We sat
down with Behlendorf to find out.”
“What’s the history of sourceXchange? Where did the idea come
from?”
“In January 1999, I started at O’Reilly with the charge of
investigating new business models in Open Source – things beyond
the obvious, beyond what people were already implementing. And
right after I started, several of us went down to HP to throw some
ideas around with them. Tim likes to send people out on
fact-finding missions to see what’s up out there. HP had this idea
for creating a task database with a “council of elders” feel to it,
and it seemed like a good idea, but the beginnings of a good idea,
OK?…”