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Behlendorf, co-founder of the Apache Web Server project and current CTO of CollabNet, a firm that hosts systems for collaboration in engineering teams distributed around the world, has an interesting interview at Netcraft. I went there just to use their handy "What's that site running?" tool, but really enjoyed Behlendorf's comments on open source software development, the SCO case, and his own company's experience with offshoring:

At the beginning of 2003, there was much discussion around the executive staff about outsourcing and/or offshoring. We had a dedicated and productive engineering staff in the U.S., but the amount of stuff we *wanted* to do was huge—and customers were demanding new features constantly. I was skeptical about the model where you hand someone a spec and magically they write code for you. While looking at this we met with a company named Enlite Technologies, who had a collaborative project management tool for the electronics-design market, and who had the majority of their engineers in Chennai, India. We were considering outsourcing some work to them, but I really liked the founder (Gopinath Ganapathy) and the team he'd formed, and I wanted something much closer and more, er, collaborative—so we decided to merge. Our products were complimentary, they had a great team in Chennai, and I figured that it was time for us to become our own best-use case in showing how our product could be used to build worldwide engineering teams, as many of our customers had done.

Since that point in time, we've integrated the two teams very tightly. Engineers in each location are spread across the combined codebases, and they know each other on a first name basis. We were the subject of an article in Salon about this. No doubt the topic is controversial, and there are huge challenges to making an offshore or outsourcing model actually work.

The open source model has a lot to do with making that possible. …