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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.'"
People leave, new people come. It ebbs and flows like everything else.
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.
more like a center. It is trivially easy to add a second or n++ remotes to a git repository. github is hardly the biggest threat to open source.
And updating/patching it is easier.
I know, right?
Slashdotters: as easily manipulated by their own water supply as any other human.
Every trollism an AC posts is prefixed, in my mind, with "A. Coward whined, in a weak and cowardly voice:"
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
Could you elaborate on why LibreOffice is so much worse than OpenOffice? I use LibreOffice mostly for opening documents, or making some spreadsheets, so I have no idea what you're talking about (I mean, I'm no poweruser, for any serious documents I use TeX).
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
Apache Software Foundation... hmmm. let me think ... you mean the Java Yank Circle?
As a user, who finds OpenOffice to be a far superior app, I shudder that your hope might come true. LibreOffice is [expletive soup] crippleware.
LibreOffice team: please quit and join Apache OpenOffice.
As a LibreOffice user, I'm genuinely curious why you think this. I switched as I was sick of Oracle's meddling and Java-related issues, but I've found LO to be a much more pleasant product to use than OpenOffice, so I'd genuinely be appreciate if you'd elaborate why you feel OO is superior.
Boo.
Don't bother the guy. He's just shillin'.
There are interface bugs (fonts occasionally not appearing in drop down menus). It is crashy with big documents and heavy formatting. They make usability changes based on niche interests (making word counts non-modal, for example) which disrupt power users and can't be turned off.
I quit using OpenOffice on principle when Oracle started FUD'ing commercial users with ad campaigns to sell enterprise editions, but regretted it instantly. I was losing a lot of time to the slow performance, crashes, unreliability and disruption to my workflow. So I guess my only objective measurement is that my job was taking longer at almost every step, and the frustrations were growing with each release.
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 forget most of the outright interface bugs. I do recall LibreOffice-Calc's font on tabs for sheets, is too small to read, and didn't respond to UI scaling.
The crashing was a big thing. TeX was before my time... if I were to use something other than a word processor for heavily formatted documents, I'd use HTML and CSS, which I've considered, except I don't know of a tool as convenient as File -> Export as PDF for making PDFs, from HTML.
That's the list I'm unable to purge from my memory, because of the many wasted hours I can't have back.
Every trollism an AC posts is prefixed, in my mind, with "A. Coward whined, in a weak and cowardly voice:"
See above reply to someone else who asked the same question :)
Every trollism an AC posts is prefixed, in my mind, with "A. Coward whined, in a weak and cowardly voice:"
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?
The hilarity of your comment could only be realized if you looked at my history of flinging hate at Oracle :)
http://thenthdoctor.wordpress.com/?s=oracle
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2928985&cid=40396955
Based on a quick eye-sweep at your recent comments, we seem to agree on some things.
Funny pun, though :)
Every trollism an AC posts is prefixed, in my mind, with "A. Coward whined, in a weak and cowardly voice:"
Why, what makes LO's team more worthy? Both suites are in active development, have a distinctly different focus (AOO for general use, LO adds features** for science/math projects) -- and, most importantly, the OO team is responsible for all of the core general-use changes that LO customizes & builds upon. It would make logical sense that the core product aimed at general users would continue having its traditional name, while the derivative (whether it's Libre- or Go-) takes a different newer one.
**which cause a massive performance hit on older hardware; my systems can run multiple 30kb odt files in AOO smoothly, but one instance of one document of any size in LO causes it to slow to a crawl. If the LO people left because they weren't being allowed to do *that* to OO, then it's for the better all around that they created their own derivative project.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
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!
Nothing wrong with LO. If it was full of bugs and problems we'd have heard about it long before now.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Both suites are in active development, have a distinctly different focus
Except there is very little Development of OpenOffice and they have the same focus...in fact its ridiculous to suggest otherwise.
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 don't have a stake in this on either side, but I run LibreOffice on Fedora at home and sometimes look at work pptx files. They rarely render properly, text is the wrong size and overlapped, embedded images are missing. It might be a problem with our corporate template, some of the objects that are inserted, whatever. But it is not useful to me for viewing work presentations.
Incidentally, while on vacation this summer I found google docs couldn't render them right either on my iPad... I had to ask people to send me pdf's to comment on them.
Guess I should have bought a surface!
There are a number of libraries that will build a PDF from HTML+CSS. They aren't perfect, but they work.
Alternatively, there's always printing as a PDF, but I've never bothered to see if that treats all your elements properly (I assume it doesn't).
I've always hated the Adobe suite of web tools, but I can't imagine that Dreamweaver (or whatever it may be called these days) would have trouble building a PDF from HTML+CSS. Though, I wouldn't be surprised if that hunk of application did a poorer job than some PHP library.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Don't feed the trolls.
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 ?
Yeah github... fork projects to your heart's content. After all, "a point in every direction is the same as no point at all." Projects without focus and process are hard pressed to survive. That is the advantage Apache brings. But sure, when process trumps progress, things need to change. But it doesn't change the fact that any process is better than none.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
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.
I'm using Impress at the moment to knock together a presentation and it's frustrating how many annoyances it has in comparison to Powerpoint - text rendering which jiggles kerning & spacing between chars depending on a box being in focus or not, highly irritating capitalization behaviour (JGit becomes Jgit even when I've added the spelling to the dictionary), numbering which puts the text way to close to the number such that they overlap, bullet boxes that can overflow instead of dynamically resizing, lack of intellisense (e.g. seeing a * or a 1. and knowing begin a bullet / number section), orphan bullets which are left there instead of cleaned up, "New Slide" buried buried in the tool bar when it would be more useful in the slide bar. It just goes on and on.
Both forks should stop back and look at themselves and their usability and dedicate an entire major release to improving it. Hundreds of little things which in themselves are merely annoying but in total sink the product.
LibreOffice (and OpenOffice) suffers a death by a thousand cuts. Lots of niggling nuisance behaviours, lack of refinement, lack of usability all make it a chore to use. They really need to make a concerted push at usability and performance.
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.
if all of the decentralized projects are on github, then they are not decentralized... github is the center.
The repositories are decentralized; losing github wouldn't maroon the code. But other things are still centralized as far as I can see, notably including issue databases. That's not very important for a small project, but for a large one that's absolutely critical.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Could you elaborate on why LibreOffice is so much worse than OpenOffice? I use LibreOffice mostly for opening documents, or making some spreadsheets, so I have no idea what you're talking about (I mean, I'm no poweruser, for any serious documents I use TeX).
There is nothing wrong with OpenOffice it is developed, per the linked article, mainly be developers from IBM. LibreOffice is developed mainly by the original OpenOffice developers. Right now there are two similar code bases, but with time they will drift apart and follow the direction and vision of their developers and sponsors. The article about Andrew in the summary has more information on it and other Apache projects.
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
LibreOffice was not something completely new, it was based on an LGPL patchset that existed long before the project.
A lot of developers simply decided they'd rather join the _existing_ LGPL project than continue dealing with Oracle being idiots and failing to communicate. Or, if donating to Apache was an ad-hoc solution that wasn't planned before, Oracle was just being through and through idiots.
Either way, almost all Linux distributions have been "LibreOffice" long before the name came up, so which one is more stable can be questioned.
if I were to use something other than a word processor for heavily formatted documents, I'd use HTML and CSS
I think you'd be more productive writing in Postscript.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
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."