Nutcases
Bunch of nutcases. How in the world can you "stop" vendor domination of a project when the vendor is the one investing 99% of the labor? If the vendor initiated the project, then basically its theirs. If the "community" wants to fork off, fine, let the community fork off and get a life.
"Changing the way software is developed - that's how we can become a defining software company, and that's working on the 90 per cent of software that's not for resale."
Load of crap. You want to define technology? Create something new! Make something neat and popular! It makes no sense whining that nobody is opening up their custom in-house software to others. Hello, its custom in-house software! The custom software in Nabisco probably has nothing in common with the custom software at Ben & Jerry's.
What these guys are talking about is not really "community" participation, but company-contributed resources for a common project. That's quite a bit different than Mozilla or Apache. Why should someone, in their off hours, want to contribute to a custom project for a few companies? So of course its the companies involved who would contribute to the project. Now, is the project something that would probably reveal too much about its trade secrets? Maybe, and maybe that's why the companies are spending their money to keep the in-house project in their house.