Ask Apache Software Chairman Greg Stein

Here's a man who obviously has his finger on the pulse of open source software development. I mean, who hasn't heard of Apache? His work history is interesting, too: He's moved from Microsoft to CollabNet to Google. And he's not shy about speaking his mind about open source, as shown in this ZDNet blog entry. Please try to confine yourself to one question per post. (If you have more than one question, post more than once.) We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Greg tomorrow and run his answers when we get them back.

Comments

untethered computing

[mfh]

Greg,
What are your thoughts on Apache's direction in regards to the new roaming AJAX desktops we keep hearing about -- what are some of the limitations you foresee in the overall untethered computing experience?

Kind Regards,
Scotty

Why...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you find it neccesary to help companies like CentOS hack rural town websites?

Why Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does everything the Apache foundation release these days have to be Java based?

I use http but thats about it. I have looked at the other Apache software but always been offputting to have to set up Java with all the classpaths etc.

Whats wrong with C or C++? Its portable and easy to install and run.

This isnt a troll, although it might look like one....

Re:Why Java?

[booch]

Another question we might ask is -- why has the Apache Foundation diversified so much? There are a lot of Apache projects out there now, many of which a lot of us are completely unfamiliar with. And some don't even have anything to do with the web. (SpamAssassin comes to mind. It's a great package, but seems to have no relation to Apache HTTPD.) What are the pros and cons of this diversity? Might it cause a lack of focus on the core HTTPD?

Re:Why Java?

[p2sam]

I don't speak for The Apache Software Foundation, but they are not simply managing the Apache HTTPD anymore. They have become more like a sourceforge like thing, except they are very selective about which projects to take on, and whose projects out of incubation are of exception quality.

Apache 1.x vs. 2.x

[filesiteguy]

I'd like to know what the continuing direction is going to be for support on 1.x - which is being used by the majority of webservers I see - and 2.x - which is what is being distributed in most recent operating system packages, such as Linux. Are you planning on supporting 1.x forever or ending support at some point and forging on with 2.x?

Open Source

[rehtonAesoohC]

Greg,

Do you believe that open source projects should always remain in the public domain- ie. that no open source projects should turn commercial?

Business Sense?

[RingDev]

From TFB: "I predict that in 5-10 years most of the software you use will be free."

Does he also predict that in 5-10 years most software development position will be gone or significantly value reduced the also?

The obvious answer is no, the market will find a balance between free and non-free business models to support further development. Some one has to pay the developers to put bread on the table. Someone has to pay the advertisers to get the word out about the project. Someone has to pay the management to keep the project on task and schedule.

-Rick

Cleaned up for actual question

[RingDev]

Given your opinion that "in 5-10 years most of the software you use will be free." How do you see the future of software development business plans? Will every software development company depend on the profits of their support department for funding?

-Rick

Free Stuff is great, but....

[celardore]

Free & Open software is great on the most part, but developers need to pay bills too. If all software was free and open, who'd want to learn to make it?

Why no other major httpd projects?

[Soko]

The Apache license allows for non or commercial distribution of Apache or a direct derivetive (with attribution), but I don't see any other products or projcts based on the Apache codebase (I know there are some) that are nearly as popular as Apache itself. Can you answer why this is?

Soko

My question

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you slip a few "accidental" holes into 1.x so there's an excuse to bump the version number all the way to 1.3.37? Please?

Open Source and Gaming

[Red Flayer]

Greg,
After reading your homepage and following many of the links, it's obvious that you are a pretty solid game enthusiast -- from your work on MUDs, playing MTG in your younger years, to enjoyment of TES:Oblivion. Do you think that open-source software has a significant role to play in mass-market gaming? Do you think that opening the code of games would enhance game devlopment?

If he's the chairman, his title ought to be

[cpt kangarooski]

Apache Chief.

In which case I'd ask him two things. First, if he has any juicy gossip about the other Superfriends. And second, if he could have other powers instead of the one he's got, would he want them, and if so, what would they be?

Critics

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you respond to critics who allege that Apache has gotten bigger and more bloated in recent releases, particularly the 2.x series?

Apache Live CD?

[fishyfool]

will there ever be an Apache live cd distro?
what i'd like to see is a live bootable cd for a server that the first time you boot from it with a clean storage drive, it asks for setup preferences and writes those to the hard drive or flash drive.
  on subsequent boots it reads those preferences from the hard drive and sets itself up automaticly.

Mullets Galore

[Anonymous Coward]

Greg,

Have you ever looked in the mirror in the morning? Seriously dude, you look like a roadie for Ratt. I think I saw you behind a guitar center once drink a beer on top of a Camaro? Seriously, what gives with the hair, clothes, etc? Someone needs to open source some style and ftp it to you pronto I guess. Take care of yourself.

Howe does it feel to

[scenestar]

Corner micorsoft with a larger marketshare and a superior product.

What's your favorite scotch?

[fitz]

So we all know that you have an affinity for Manhattans, but what's your favorite scotch? Favorite as in "stuck on a desert island with one bottle of scotch".

What's in a name?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you think it's appropriate to use/borrow the name of a people for a large visible public project/undertaking without asking their permission first? Have you ever asked a representative of the Apache people what they think about the fact that their name is used for your project?

Bloat and new competition.

[booch]

What do you think of the newer smaller competitors? Particularly LightTPD. Would it be worthwhile for Apache to work to "slim down"? While Apache is seen by many as a slimmer alternative to more monolithic servers like IIS, it seems that it may be vulnerable to the even smaller alternatives. And this new round of competitors is nearly as featureful and extendable as Apache. What can Apache do to stay current and competitive?

Policy on recognition in code contributions

[Leknor]

Apache seems to have a policy against programmers having their name in a comment for the code they contribute to. For much of the open source world, the code is a major medium that programmers express ideas like a canvas is the medium a painter expresses themselves or the pages of book is for a writer. Admittedly programming is more of an engineering skill than it is an artistic skill but well written code still takes an artistic eye. Discouraging a programmer from identifying their contributions is in effect discouraging them from taking the utmost pride in their craft. Why does Apache remove incentives for people to do their best work?

Management

[StressedEd]

Dear Greg,

We often read about managment problems with large software projects. The Apache web server is a large, well maintained and stable platform. This obviously didn't happen by accident but as a result of the team all knowing what they were supposed to do.

With this in mind, what are your personal top ten management do's and dont's with regard to large software projects?

Regards,

-ed

Stein

[GoatMonkey2112]

Any relation to Ben? Can we win your money?

2.2 - wait for it

[PhYrE2k2]

Wait for 2.2 (currently 2.1) to go stable.
The lingering daemon functionality that was provided externally in 1.3 is back and in core 2.2.

This will be a huge boost for large providers to serve more connections and provide good reason.

At present, I recommend 2.x just because it's closer to 2.2 (and hence involves less configuration and setup quirks later on)- They're about equal now with the prefork.

I'd say that people expected a huge benefit, but didn't quite get it right away. In a Web server, it just needs to work, and both worked- so why upgrade for slightly slower performance and no additional features. What people failed to realize is that changing this framework around provides long-term growth and renews the project to increase its extensibility such as module ordering in the long term.
As that long term comes now, you'll see a lot more move to that as the gains keep showing up, now that the framework is stable.
-M

Segmented Servers

[PhYrE2k2]

Has any thought been put into doing what FastCGI has done, only within Apache and its modules rather than between Apache and some other program? This could reduce the core server size, allow threading and other fun where it wasn't before, and use resources more efficiently, passing proper apache structures to a module server that could pass that same structure to PHP/Perl/TK/etc and back again?

-M

Why not improve Apache 2's usability?

[Alpha_Traveller]

It seems to me that there are more newbies to Linux every day. With Apache 2 being such an important Web services platform, it appears very powerful but not all that easy for a person new to Apache to set up. Why kind of efforts do you plan to undertake to improve the set-up process for Windows and Linux flavors?

Bedtime

[Elitist_Phoenix]

Being the chairman of such an important and successful project such as apache, how much money do you sleep on at night with how many beautiful women?