Slashdot Mirror
Has the Apache Software Foundation Lost Its Way?
snydeq writes "Complaints of stricture over structure, signs of technical prowess on the wane — the best days of the Apache Software Foundation may be behind, writes InfoWorld's Serdar Yegalulp. 'Since its inception, the Apache Software Foundation has had a profound impact in shaping the open source movement and the tech industry at large. ... But tensions within the ASF and grumbling throughout the open source community have called into question whether the Apache Way is well suited to sponsoring the development of open source projects in today's software world. Changing attitudes toward open source licensing, conflicts with the GPL, concerns about technical innovation under the Way, fallout from the foundation's handling of specific projects in recent years — the ASF may soon find itself passed over by the kinds of projects that have helped make it such a central fixture in open source, thanks in some measure to the way the new wave of bootstrapped, decentralized projects on GitHub don't require a foundation-like atmosphere to keep them vibrant or relevant.' Meanwhile, Andrew C. Oliver offers a personal perspective on his work with Apache, why he left, and how the foundation can revamp itself in the coming years: 'I could never regret my time at Apache. I owe it my career to some degree. It isn't how I would choose to develop software again, because my interests and my role in the world have changed. That said, I think the long-term health of the organization requires it get back to its ideals, open up its private lists, and let sunshine disinfect the interests. My poorly articulated reasons for leaving a long time ago stemmed from my inability to effect that change.'"
We all know that the License was chosen to placate IBM, but really it needs to given to the LibreOffice Developers. Anything else is stupid.
People leave, new people come. It ebbs and flows like everything else.
if all of the decentralized projects are on github, then they are not decentralized... github is the center.
Look for the mole working hard behind the scenes to make the Apache Foundation flounder.
The web server glides on pure inertia. The libraries are not much less work than rolling your own. Their documentation is a joke.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Clickbait article claims major open source software foundation is useless.
We'll always need software foundations -- or did you think people out there will work on open source software for free as their primary occupation?
And updating/patching it is easier.
So much of the code there is utter, utter crap. I mean, it's now getting to the point where somebody tosses in some highly experimental code they wrote, with no comments, no supporting documentation, and usually a ton of bugs, yet it's considered a "project".
Its convenient hosting, if youre not interested in being secretive about what youre doing then whacking code snippets (which is often what they are, many dont have any license at all) on public github is an easy way to access them from wherever and to share with people. It doesnt have to be production-level, shipping code, it can be a script you wrote for a very specific case that fails in all others, so what?
Not really any different to the FSF, and all they really have is the userland for GNU/Linux distributions. In 3 decades they *still* dont have a production kernel.
The FSF is just doing great, and their kernel is still being developed albeit not on the scale on the similarly licensed and awesome Linux. Which is kind of the point. The reality is the FSF does lots of things. The License still succeeded even if Linus values it for its Tit for Tat qualities as opposed to freedom, but its there, and its close enough to being free software. The also do a little more than a kernel. I someone who is not a Fruit Lover, I personally wished that they had got further with Gnash, a free Flash implementation. I hoped it would open up Flash Development with all the positives without the down sides.
The bottom Line is Linus is so Amazing
Apache Software Foundation... hmmm. let me think ... you mean the Java Yank Circle?
I've never understood why they were so keen on helping Oracle thumb their nose at LibreOffice the rest of the FOSS community. My opinion of them took a nosedive when they did that, as I'm sure did many others'. What was the point, exactly?
I haven't had to patch apache.. ever?
Now if I need to know what my word count is, Alt-T-W-(glance)-Spacebar is back in effect, which takes about 1 second. Since the non-modal word count was also (surprise!) as buggy as an old corpse, the LibreOffice alternative was Alt-T-W-(glance)-spacebar, crap I just accidentally deleted a paragraph, Ctrl-Z, triple-click paragraph, Shift-Left-Right (in case that would force the word count to update after the triple-click; it usually didn't), close word count, Alt-T-W, move mouse to the Close button, click. Time, about 7 seconds.
I look down at the statusbar 1 second LibreOffice FTW!
Once again we have a clear example of Betteridge's law of headlines: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
Apache is more than just a place to host your code, it provides a lot of other infrastructure, including legal protection. I bet half the projects on GitHub would be dead with the threat of a lawsuit.
Once again we have a clear example of Betteridge's law of headlines: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
If it can be "Yes" too. Andrew C. Oliver clearly thinks so "I have a lot of respect for many of the people on the Apache board, but it's probably time for new leadership and a new perspective on what makes a successful project -- and when it should really, truly be allowed out of incubation and how to ensure private interests don't cloud judgement regarding that". The reality is the answer is more complex than that.
I understand Betteridge's law of headlines...I am simply tired of it being misunderstood.
I am hardly a 'power' user of office software. I use it at home for some spreadsheats and word processing. The current Libre Office version in my Ubuntu 12.04... release freezes up my whole machine in ways OpenOffice never did.
There you have it. Anectodal evidence, but it is one data point. I could care less which one I'm using, but OpenOffice did work much better for me.
I believe it has. Is this Ballmer's new gig? Would that be proof enough for the doubters?
Apache OpenOffice like Harmony before - propped up by IBM. LibreOffice has supporters from lots of companies and non-profits. They has 20000 commits per year, under 2000 commits at Apache and is innovating.
http://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/advisory-board/
http://www.documentfoundation.org/supporters/
are any of the LibreOffice bugs filed that are complained about ? those guys need to know them to fix them.
Anybody who thinks that it is good enough has never done anything but plain text.
... is anything more than just more commits.
You can have 1 million commits and the product doesn't even compile.
It is worth to recognize that the licensing provided by Apache is different from the licensing provided by GPL, and that both have their merits and disadvantages.
As long as the organizations of Apache and GNU are aware that their existence depends on the license models they have both will continue to exist along with fully commercial licenses. There are of course a myriad of sub variants of licenses too of all of them.
When it comes to lawsuits - the only winners there are the lawyers. Everyone else will lose. Usually a lawsuit is like a traffic accident on a bridge - it slows the traffic for a while, but the traffic will catch up or find new paths and a few lawyers will get some lined pockets.
From the overall perspective it is important to realize that without the Open Source community the exchange of knowledge would be a lot lower and development in the commercial sphere would stagnate. Don't waste effort in trying to protect old stuff, put effort into going forward.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I agree. Best make decisions based on historic marketing and brand strength not technical merit ! Why user need feature ? Why user need real community when they have comfortable brand ?
Virtual communities like open source software groups or other virtual organizations have an inherent problem with leadership. The main reason is that it's not so easy for somebody to lead unless others see him talk in person. Charismatic leaders build consensus by convincing others partly because they present strong arguments, but also because people like to watch them talk as they are effective public speakers and often of above average looks.
In a virtual community most of that body language, charisma and good looks disappears in asynchronous, e-mail based communication. So for a person to lead a virtual community effectively, he has to be super knowledgeable on the subject and have lots credit to his name. Like Linus does or.. like.. Vint Cerf or, dunno some other famous tech person.
So ..yeah, it's hard.
Where's the progress on Apache's httpd server? It's still mostly configured from a monolithic, messy text file with .htaccess files sometimes strewn around random directories. There is no web-based configuration even though it's a *web server*. There's no other GUI configuration, and building one to work with Apache's text file is very hard at best.
I've now switched to Cherokee and I'm not looking back. I'm not sure what happened to progress with Apache.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
... who is taking the Java perspective on the ASF. Granted, there are tons and tons of Java projects under the ASF umbrella, but the old guard (the seniority in the meritocracy) has very little to do with Java. That's one of them conflict points right there.
The ASF has not lost its way. It has been overtaken by recent developments, mostly the massive flocking of projects and developers to github, and does not have an answer to that. Either the ASF reinvents itself, or it slithers gently into oblivion within a few years.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Serdar Yegalulp has a track record of just making up non-articles as filler for InfoWorld, so why is he getting attention? At least Dvorak could be entertaining - Yegalulp produces endless filler.
Ahh, that's a great propaganda opportunity. Microsoft is Anti-Gay. Have fun with taking the heat from that. SUCKER.
I use Microsoft Office at home and it works great! My employer purchased a license for us to use on our systems at work, and as a result I now am able to download two licenses for home use.This is a fairly common thing for MS Office licenses. I mean, as much as I love open-source, sometimes you just need to stop being so miserly, bite the bullet and shell out some shekels for the real-deal. Open Office? I like it, but its no MS Office. Libre Office? Seriously? I'd rather cut off my hands slowly with a bic than use that stuff.
I'd give the article more credence if the author wasn't using a pseudonym.
This was my comment back in 2002 about Star/Open Office
http://www.computerworld.com/news/2002/story/0,11280,73896,00.html
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
This conversation is exactly the *one* sort of place where a works-for-me comment *is* helpful. The OP used to use LibreOffice, back when it was buggy and you had to manually invoke wordcount, but has since uninstalled it (and now uses AOO). The works-for-me reply is talking about the *current* version of LO, which is now automatic wordcount (including of the current text-selection), and no longer buggy. That is a useful piece of info.
You are complaining about an entirely different situation, where person#1 is running version#x on their machine, and person#2 is running exactly the same version#x on their very-differently-configured machine. In that case, works-for-me is pretty non-helpful.
The valuable toolchain, i.e. gcc and the GPL especially, were not merely ported to Linux after the fact -- they were arguably necessary to the *creation* of Linux, in the first place. Why create a GPL'd kernel, if you cannot then port the valuable userland toolchain over to it? How to create a copyleft kernel, if there was no GPL? That's the reason RMS has been encouraging people to use "GNU/Linux" as a generic term.
Of course, the "GNU" prefix is vain bullshit. We don't call it Newton's/Einstein's theory of special relativity... although without newtonian graviational theory, and even more important newtonian calculus (or was that leibniz calculus?), Einstein would never have had the 'valuable toolchain' necessary to come up with special relativity. Note that we *do* speak of calculus as being Newton/Leibniz calculus, or at least some of us do, because they both came up almost exactly the same thing, around exactly the same time.
So, if RMS had finished his kernel project in 1992, and merged with the Linux kernel in 1993, which then went on to produce slackware/redhat/debian/etc shortly thereafter, *then* methinks it would be reasonably to call it LinRimUx or something like that. Of course, for simplicity and/or for marketing reasons, either Linux or Rimux would have been picked as the winner. Kinda like if they got married, they would probably stick with a single last name, rather than Torvalds-Stallman (or vice versa). One hyphen is not bad, but once they have kids -- adopted presumably -- with the hyphenated last name, and little Gnu Torvalds-Stallman gets married to Libre deRaadt-Raymond, then the grandchildren start to have a combinatorial explosion of quad-last-naming, and the great-grandchildren octo-last-names.... Moral of the story: jamming all dependencies together into the name of the offspring is a foolish idea, for practicality if nothing else. Hence: do not use "GNU/Linux" for the simple reason that it is a foolish and vain naming-convention.
However, don't just pretend that the kernel sprung forth from the brow of Linus on fine day. Even if that were true, without the toolchain to implement his ideas, the GPL to protect his ideas, and eventually the userland to complement his implemented ideas, would we ever have heard of Linux? Good practical naming conventions are important, but clearly understanding project history is also important (look at any large and/or controversial open source project and you will find 'toolchains' and 'dependencies' everywhere, both of the technical sort, and usually of the social/process/legal/community sort as well).