3 ms·

There are so many Apache projects these days (mostly seem to be in the incubator) - where do they all come from? I had once thought that Apache was a dumping gr

by vosper 11y ago

There are so many Apache projects these days (mostly seem to be in the incubator) - where do they all come from? I had once thought that Apache was a dumping ground for the technology of failed startups, but a lot of these projects seem to find new life in the incubator - so they must be doing something right.

AlphaSite 11y ago
The list of big name Apache projects is nuts, look at their project lists and you can easily pull out dozens of big projects and even incubator has a few popular projects.
- monksy 11y ago
  It's hard to find whats worthwhile and what isn't.
jkovacs 11y ago
Lots of these (including this one) come out of universities, or university-corporate research partnerships. Personally I'm very glad that universities nowadays seem to be more okay with publishing tangible results (i.e. source code) as opposed to "just" the research papers. I don't think it's always been that way. I can't begin to imagine the amount of work that is rotting on someone's old usb stick, because they weren't allowed to publish their PhD theses's source code.
mindcrime 11y ago
where do they all come from? From what I've seen, there are two major sources, and one slightly less prevalent one: 1. Big companies. If you go through the incubator, you'll find quite a few projects where there was a large code grant, and many initial contributors, from one large company or another. Facebook, IBM, Yahoo, Oracle, etc. 2. Academia. A lot of projects are existing OSS projects being developed as part of academic research, and now the team wants to formalize the project structure and get the project to a wide audience. The slightly less prevalent one: 3. Just ordinary OSS projects developed $WHEREVER, not necessarily affiliated with any company or university, and the team just decide that Apache would make a good home for their project. Anyway, I definitely wouldn't call the ASF "a dumping ground for the technology of failed startups". If anything the incubator is designed to prevent that sort of thing. If projects don't successfully complete incubation, they don't become full fledged TLPs. Now, there are people who quibble over how long some projects linger in the incubator, sometimes in a sort of half-dead/half-alive zombie state, but by and large the process works pretty well.

by vosper 11y ago

AlphaSite 11y ago

The list of big name Apache projects is nuts, look at their project lists and you can easily pull out dozens of big projects and even incubator has a few popular projects.

monksy 11y ago
It's hard to find whats worthwhile and what isn't.

jkovacs 11y ago

Lots of these (including this one) come out of universities, or university-corporate research partnerships. Personally I'm very glad that universities nowadays seem to be more okay with publishing tangible results (i.e. source code) as opposed to "just" the research papers. I don't think it's always been that way. I can't begin to imagine the amount of work that is rotting on someone's old usb stick, because they weren't allowed to publish their PhD theses's source code.

mindcrime 11y ago

where do they all come from? From what I've seen, there are two major sources, and one slightly less prevalent one: 1. Big companies. If you go through the incubator, you'll find quite a few projects where there was a large code grant, and many initial contributors, from one large company or another. Facebook, IBM, Yahoo, Oracle, etc. 2. Academia. A lot of projects are existing OSS projects being developed as part of academic research, and now the team wants to formalize the project structure and get the project to a wide audience. The slightly less prevalent one: 3. Just ordinary OSS projects developed $WHEREVER, not necessarily affiliated with any company or university, and the team just decide that Apache would make a good home for their project. Anyway, I definitely wouldn't call the ASF "a dumping ground for the technology of failed startups". If anything the incubator is designed to prevent that sort of thing. If projects don't successfully complete incubation, they don't become full fledged TLPs. Now, there are people who quibble over how long some projects linger in the incubator, sometimes in a sort of half-dead/half-alive zombie state, but by and large the process works pretty well.