I usually do my best to look at the positive facets of people and things, even when mistakes happen. Today, however, seeing a press release that tries to associate the ASF with preferences for PCs over Macs and M$ Office over OpenOffice makes me really angry.

Holy crap! If this is what people get out of ApacheCon, we might as well stop having conferences right now.

(As usual here, this post represents my personal opinion, not an official statement of any sort).

To put things in perspective, I'll note that the ApacheCon conferences are produced by an independent company, not by the Apache Software Foundation itself. Said company apparently contracted the brilliant PR agency who authored that press release - looks like the ASF might have to fix some things in there.

Here's what I wrote in my nomination ballot for the ASF board a few months ago:

...keeping the ASF independent of business influences, while providing a neutral ground for those businesses to collaborate, is a constant challenge. I think preserving this independence will require increased efforts in the next few years, as open source moves even closer to center stage - with corresponding increased interest from businesses in what we do and in the Apache brand...

Sounds like I'm unfortunately being proven right by such PR junk.

Update: "PR junk" might be too harsh a statement - thinking about it it seems like i hate most press releases anyway, so you might need to take that with a grain of salt.