Apache Comes With Too Much Community Overhead?
drizzle writes "There's an interesting story on the Apache Marketing blog about whether or not Apache projects come with too much overhead, especially compared with other services or a roll-your-own approach. The article states, 'It's true that compared with SourceForge, Apache has a more rigorous management structure. The ASF has formalized processes and procedures that we believe represent best practices governance. All new projects must pass through an incubation period to ensure that all of the project's members have internalized these processes. However, each project's leadership has a tremendous amount of discretion in managing within this framework.' There is also a follow up article written by one of the httpd developers about 'What Apache brings to the table.' The article cites community, experience, legal framework, diversity, brand strength, and networking as reasons why developers and companies should consider bringing their projects over to Apache."
How about the "overhead" of the various BSDs? FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD all have what could be described as "too much overhead" in their development model. Yet all three are considered among the shining stars of FOSS operating systems. Stable, robust, and "you know what you're getting".
BTW- Apache is developed primarily on FreeBSD.
I'm dreading the upgrade to BSD.
Don't Be
Yes, Apache 1.x is enormously popular. But that's not where the work in the Apache project has gone recently; recently, they have been working on Apache 2.x, XML-related projects, and lots of other projects. Are you using any of those more recent projects? How much impact have those projects actually had? And is the amount of effort that has gone into them justified by their impact?