I think things like this are a good way to get companies more aligned with contributing to open source, even aside from the mammoth technology companies already involved. I know that for many companies, the decision not to open source parts of their software isn't based on any idealogical disagreement with open source, but because their software projects haven't been designed with open sourcing as a goal, and if they can now take that into account when starting new projects, I'd expect that you might see a lot more open source software. So I think an organization that helps foster that can provide a lot of benefit.
And I'm not even a big open source zealot, but the number of companies who "get" the fact that participating in open source can be useful for lots of reasons (many better than "get the community to do work for free for us"), could certainly stand to be higher.
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James Pearce (Facebook Open Source Person commenting in here) gave a pretty interesting talk about Facebook's internal Open Source process at OSCon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzL6Zoy_ndk&list=UUP_lo1MFyx5...
I think things like this are a good way to get companies more aligned with contributing to open source, even aside from the mammoth technology companies already involved. I know that for many companies, the decision not to open source parts of their software isn't based on any idealogical disagreement with open source, but because their software projects haven't been designed with open sourcing as a goal, and if they can now take that into account when starting new projects, I'd expect that you might see a lot more open source software. So I think an organization that helps foster that can provide a lot of benefit.
And I'm not even a big open source zealot, but the number of companies who "get" the fact that participating in open source can be useful for lots of reasons (many better than "get the community to do work for free for us"), could certainly stand to be higher.