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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.
Solr for starters
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
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.
Solr, hadoop, activemq?
Seriously.
Check out this link: http://projects.apache.org/indexes/quick.html
Granted, not all of these are of the highest quality, but it may jog your memory of a few projects which are used in high demand environments everyday.
ActiveMQ, Ant, Avro, Cassandra, Derby, Geronimo, HBase, Hive, Hadoop, JMeter, Lucene, Maven, Pig, Solr, Subversion, Thrift, Tomcat, Zookeeper.
Don't underestimate the impact Apache has had.
.
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.
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:"
ActiveMQ, Ant, Avro, Cassandra, Derby, Geronimo, HBase, Hive, Hadoop, JMeter, Lucene, Maven, Pig, Solr, Subversion, Thrift, Tomcat, Zookeeper.
Don't underestimate the impact Apache has had.
Subversion was originally tigris.org. Geronimo and Derby were IBM products (all donated). Also log4j.
Apache has developed or adopted more products than I can count. OpenJPA, Apache Commons, Axis, CXF, Velocity, Struts. The list goes on and on.
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?
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."
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.
So I guess by the same metric, Android isn't Linux either. It is called GNU/Linux, not GNU Linux, the difference being that it is the mix of both tools, not saying that Linux comes from GNU.
OpenOffice is a good alternative, but by no means best in class. Maybe it is the only serious solution on Linux and that is a different thing. Best in class in that area is still Microsoft Office by a long shot, hell and even Corel WordPerfect Office, since it has some really cool PDF editing tools in the word processor itself.
But other than that, I think Apache is doing great, even if I never was a Java fan. They have very interesting projects like Nutch/Solr, Traffic Server and by being the main bastion of heavy Java open source development. And if one thing their projects have is their focus in stability, which is something of a lost art in a lot of places nowadays.
Calling it GNU/Linux is suggesting that Linux is just as much a part of the GNU project, as much as gcc, flex, bison, bash, gawk, gdb, and other tools. It is not. It's Linux... not GNU/Linux... the prefix was added by people who simply got tired of waiting for Hurd when Linux did everything that they wanted, and serendipitously was also released under the GPL, but it was not ever part of the GNU project, so GNU/Linux is as much of a misnomer as BSD Linux (since Linux can be distributed with BSD tools instead).
If being distributed with the GNU tools were sufficient to put a GNU prefix on the OS, then, as I said, Minix should be GNU/Minix. The HPUX system that I used in when I was in university had all GNU tools replacing the standard ones, but it would be an error to say I was ever using GNU/HPUX.
The GNU tools were *ported* to Linux... just like they were to every other system, and by virtue of Linux being highly similar to sysv,, and ultimately actually posix compliant, that port was trivial. But that doesn't make it GNU.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'