“It seems like a contradiction in terms — open source software is by definition created for free by coders who want to make a name for themselves writing components that organizations use at no charge. So how could one company come to dominate a world where the product is made and bought for free?
“If you’re Jason van Zyl, co-founder and chief technology officer of Sonatype, you know that the answer comes from his seminal role in creating Apache Maven – a tool that lets organizations manage a systems development project’s build, reporting and documentation.
“As van Zyl explained in an April 20th interview, Sonatype gets 4 billion request per year, has 9 million developers, and is used by 300,000 companies. Through its Central Repository, Sonatype has become the industry standard website for clumps of Java and .net code that perform most of the functions needed by systems developers — such as creating reports.”