[MUSIC] We got our start in the early days of the web as a group of disaffected web masters who were using a piece of freely available web software but had difficulty with it. We were fixing bugs. We were sharing these bugs fixes with each other like baseball trading cards if you will, these patches as it's called. And one day we discovered the group that put out the web server that we were using. Basically folded when all their developers left to go join a brand new company called Netscape. So a bunch of us decided that, hey, we're dependent upon this software. We don't want to become full-time web server developers but we want to be able to use this thing that we've had for free and be able to improve it and all that kind of stuff. We looked at the license of the code, and the license said, here's the software. Do whatever you want with it. Don't blame us when it breaks. And we said, hey that's a pretty good bargain. Why don't we pass the same bargain onto the next group of people, right? So we formed a mailing list, right? And this was mostly, again, webmasters and people working at similarly internet service providers or website design companies or places like Amazon, or the Internet Movie Database. And we combined our patches together and decided to call it Apache server for that reason, and went forward. And really the model of how we worked was based upon kind of us as a group as peers. Proposing ideas, vetting each other's ideas and patches and fixing bugs as a group, as a team. None of us had met in person, well some of us had met, but as a group we didn't meet in person until 1998. Really, three years after we got our start. And long after, by the way, we'd become the most predominant web server product on the planet. And yet, at this time, still no money, no dime, not direct to us from this piece of open source software. But plenty of us made our living off of building things on top of this piece. And that's really the story I think of successful open source projects writ large, which is people working together on common technologies to solve common problems, so they can go off and make money in other places. Or, so they can have fun, they can try new ideas, they can be experimental, right? That's really the same story of Apache, of Linux, and all these other open source projects. It turns out to be not that hard to be able to work together when people have the same common goal. Which is, let's build a product that does all this great stuff. One thing that we did do that made it easy to make some of these decisions, was to have a very modular API, which made it easy for us to be able to say, hey if you want that special cool feature, do it as a separate thing. And make it successful, and we'll decide whether to bring this into the product once it's become successful or not, right? Another key thing that plays into this, that is true of all open source projects is that an open source license, like we had on ours, that Linux has, etc., carries with it something called the right to fork. Which means that if I were to go all Colonel Kurtz on the project and start saying we're going to go here and no one else wanted to follow, well all of those other people could decide to pick up the code and go start a different project somewhere else, if they couldn't kick me out which is probably what they would've tried to do first. All right. This right to fork means that you don't have to have any tolerance for dictators. You don't have to deal with people who make bad technical decisions. You can take that future into your hands. And if you find a group of other people who agree with you, you can go on and create a new project around it. So I think that rule, that right to fork limits the kind of excesses that we see whenever we start to talk about how do groups make decisions. And conflict arises, how do you deal with that conflict? And it means that style of leadership isn't so much one of control and plotting moves ahead of time, but instead one of being able to get people on your side. Convince them that you're going to value their efforts, value the contributions that they make. [MUSIC]
