I've had a loook at the Apache website and found their incubator program quite intriguing.
I'm quite fond of open source as a means of collaboration, fellow developers cameraderie, (academic) research and
covering overlooked niches, but not as a a political/ideological means to harm commercial companies or anticapitalism.
Cleared that up, Apache foundation comprises a whole range of technologies battling .NET or MS products.
There are groups working on Apache, the webserver, PHP ,Phyton and ultimately Java in the Jakarta project.
Apart from these majors, there are several hundreds of subprojects, including most of the leading open source frameworks
for building and testing software(Junit, Ant. Log4J etc etc). Even .NET is represented with Log4Net.
As a coalition Apache has lots of credibility, good software and the support of all ABM vendors and users.
Now, as an evangelist of MS technology - despite my regular rants - I see Apache as a formidable nemesis for
MS, but also view Apache with some envy as there is nothing comparable in the .NET world.
It would make a wise business decision for MS to clone the setup. The pros would be able to create an independent conglomerate of the top 20 openly available projects like Ghengis, OpenCF,DNN ,.Text add some of the MS magic like the Application Blocks, Project Niobe and mix with INETA, MVPs and the other technology stalwarts of the MS influence sphere.
Scoble?
links:
http://weblogs.asp.net/sandyk/archive/2004/03/02/82914.aspx
http://weblogs.asp.net/rjacobs/archive/2004/02/09/70355.aspx
http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/archive/2004/02/10/70706.aspx
http://weblogs.asp.net/markcli/archive/2004/01/12/58041.aspx
http://weblogs.asp.net/jezell/archive/2004/02/10/70828.aspx
http://weblogs.asp.net/jledgard/archive/2004/03/03/83645.aspx