Jim is a well known and acknowledged expert and visionary in Open Source, an accomplished coder, and frequent engaging presenter on all things Open, Web and Cloud related. As a developer, he’s made substantial code contributions to just about every core technology behind the Internet and Web and in 2012 was awarded the O’Reilly Open Source Award and in 2015 received the Innovation Luminary Award from the EU. He is likely best known as one of the developers and co-founders of the Apache Software Foundation, where he has previously served as both Chairman and President and where he’s been on the Board Of Directors since day one. He serves as President of the Outercurve Foundation and was also a director of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and. He works at Capital One as a Sr. Director in the Tech Fellows program. He credits his wife Eileen in keeping him sane.
Authored Comments
Well, "non-technical" is kinda nebulous... The general public may not know what Open Source is, but how many of them need to really grok it? Sure, there are some popular end-user FOSS programs out there, like Apache OpenOffice and GIMP, which are targeted to the generic user, but those are the exception, and the nuances of Open Source will be lost on them, imo, no matter what we call it.
The real target audience are developers and more technically oriented end-users and esp business/corps/gov't and other entities where FOSS provides significant reasons for use and adoption. And that is where re-branding would confuse things rather than make them more clear ("I've heard of Open Source, what is Community Software?" "Um, it's basically just Open Source." "Then why did you change the name?").
And the term "Open" itself is gaining more traction itself, mainly due to leveraging the brand of Open Source. You see things like "Open Data", "Open Government" and those terms are starting to make inroads. So even for those who don't really understand Open Source, they understand Open, and by explaining "source is like the recipe behind how to create software" it's pretty easy to make people grasp the concept I think.
But what about single developer FOSS? It's still Open Source but not "collaborative"? Plus, people can collaborate on something but have it NOT under an OSI license. IMO that would muddy the waters even worse ;)