Managing the Corporate-Community Boundary
summary
A corporation facing community mistrust builds a 200-question FAQ as a cross-functional forcing mechanism that clarifies goals, licenses, contribution rules, roadmaps and incentives, and compels leadership and legal to decide. The process picks concrete licenses (e.g. GPL with Classpath exception for SE and straight GPL for ME), produces OpenJDK and supporting collateral, and surfaces risks later used in litigation. The FAQ becomes living documentation, simplifies marketing, and even persuades skeptics — famously prompting a Stallman promo video endorsement.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Introduction to talk
- 2:27Why companies struggle with communities
- 4:14Sun’s open source Java struggles
- 11:23Why write an FAQ for open source
- 13:11Audience and developer focus
- 15:59Answering tough community questions
- 19:53Java licensing strategy explained
- 23:07What to include in the FAQ
- 24:31How to start writing the FAQ
- 25:12Who should write the FAQ
- 26:57Leadership and compromise in open source
- 28:02Changing incentives for adoption
- 29:05Legal risks of transparency
- 30:26Executive resistance to FAQ
- 31:30Marketing benefits of the FAQ
- 32:12Results and Richard Stallman’s approval
- 34:26Summary and key takeaways
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