Who let the dogs out?

There are open source teams that configure themselves much like a conventional closed-source team. The team has a clear hierarchy where someone has the final say, the team’s goal is to create software to benefit “users” and other “stakeholders”, and the team’s underlying objective is to acquire as many users and stakeholders as possible. Users are somebody else.

The founding principle of an ASF team is that we too are the users. We create the software for our own use and benefit, and then we share the result with other users.

We eat our own dog food, and we pass the bowl.

Our participation in the team stems from our own external use of the team’s product. We use the product in our own day jobs, and we cordially invite others to do the same. The interest of team members will vary, depending on how things are going on the day job. Accordingly, we need a steady infux of new contributors. Attracting new users is our way of recruiting new contributors.
When an open source team is not comprised of users, and the object of the exercise is to create software for other people to use, dynamics like “competition” and “jingoism” do come into play for those teams, just like they do for conventional closed-source teams. But, at the foundation, we are not trying to mimic conventional teams.

• The point of the ASF is to foster projects where the participants are creating the software that they themselves want to use.
  An ASF community is not the set of all users and other stakeholders. An ASF community is the set of active participants who make concrete contributions to the code, documentation, and project infrastructure.

We aren’t selling fish; we’re digging fishing holes.