ApacheCon EU 2014

A popular misconception in some circles is that Apache values policy so much that it effectively damages a project's opportunity to grow. Reality is, whenever the Apache policy gets in the way of a project something is wrong. But the current policy and practices were conceived as tools to help projects rather than damaging them. The incubation (and, later, the presence) of OpenOffice at Apache brought the need to rethink several policy issues and set precedents for new ones. In most cases, we found the solution by going back to the rationale for a policy and implementing it in the right way for our case. We'll see several examples of cases where policy was reinterpreted in order to help the project and not to obstacle it.