6 ms·

Is it me or has Apache increasingly become the place open source projects of big companies go to die? OpenOffice, Geronimo, Harmony, Wave, etc.pp. I really thi

Is it me or has Apache increasingly become the place open source projects of big companies go to die? OpenOffice, Geronimo, Harmony, Wave, etc.pp. I really think that Apache should stop incubating projects which were essentially discarded by their corporate owners. Successful OSS projects are either community projects from day one (HTTPd etc) or require (at least initially) strong interest and involvement of the company that donates the code. How can you expect a community to magically develop around an abandoned project?

orionblastar 10y ago
Actually I think this is the way that FOSS projects are designed. If one group can't maintain it, another can take it over. Netbeans was fine for a while and then better tools came out. I used Frontpage and Visual Interdev in the mid to late 1990s, discovered Netbeans later on. I remember downloading Netbeans with the Java SDK.
johnhenry 10y ago
Arguably, it's not where open-source projects go to die, but rather, where we send projects that should die, but we're just not ready to let them go.
sspiff 10y ago
I was thinking the same thing. Many big open source projects are "entrusted" to Apache after their funding/support is cut off. Why is Apache taking these up / wasting time on them? So far all of them have died shortly after, with no significant improvements landing once Apache has taken over.
- ricksplat 10y ago
  > Why is Apache taking these up / wasting time on them? Presumably they get some funding in return. It makes $$$ sense for those entrusting if they have an established user base they no longer want to support.
  - jimjag 10y ago
    The discussions and rationale for accepting any and all projects is done on-list, on the public Incubator threads. There are no "side deals" or "arrangements" other that was is opening and publicly discussed. In any case, any sort of quid-pro-quo about funding is NOT part of the equation.
    - ricksplat 10y ago
      I didn't mean there were "side deals" I just presumed that funding for Apache came from somewhere and this is surely somewhat from the organisations that donate technology. To say it's NOT part of the equation is naive at best, disingenuous at worst. Money is ALWAYS part of the equation.
      - ricksplat 10y ago
        http://www.apache.org/foundation/thanks.html http://www.apache.org/foundation/thanks.html
- toopok4k3 10y ago
  Because the software still works and can be used by someone. Sure they might not be maintained and bug fixes wont happen. If the software does something that has no free alternative, the Apache one can still be used by someone for something to fill a need somewhere. Yeah I know this is an absurd concept (to some) that someone might use older than a few year old tech. Being an Apache project means(to me at least) that the product is ready to use and someone has used it before with at least some success. I trust a random open source product much less than anything Apache.
- vorg 10y ago
  > Many big open source projects are "entrusted" to Apache after their funding/support is cut off Although "entrusted" to Apache, they're still controlled by the same people who change their titles from XXXX Project Manager at BigCorp to Apache PMS Chair for XXXX. These people are often the reason the project funding is cut off, and they'd rather keep control of a shrinking ecosystem than give up some control so the project can be saved, where they'd have a smaller share of a larger ecosystem.
jsight 10y ago
People used to say that the surest sign of death for a project was to get a domain at Apache.org. This goes back at least ten years.
- moondowner 10y ago
  It's still the same... "OpenOffice, after years of neglect, could shut down" http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/09/openoffice-after-years-of-neglect-could-shut-down/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/09/openof...
geodel 10y ago
It is not you. If you look closely at Apache projects. They are mostly Java type projects in various state of completion. Some are either failed at corporates and hence dumped there (struts, cordova and so on) or too experimental and hence good place get wider audience. If successful the main sponsor will add proprietary features/components and sell product and/or support(e.g Hadoop ecosystem components). Some exceptions to this are Apache Http server, tomcat, svn etc.
- DashRattlesnake 10y ago
  > struts Wasn't Struts a once-popular non-failure whose time has passed; rather than a corporate failure that was "dumped"?
- smrtinsert 10y ago
  I look at the project list and I think the great majority are not dead and abandoned. They are not the hottest list of tech but they are stable and used.
  - andrewbinstock 10y ago
    That's in part because the dead ones and the dump-ware are migrated by Apache to the "attic."
- _wmd 10y ago
  There are plenty of live and popular Apache projects that get plenty of press time: Zookeeper, Hadooop, CouchDB, Cassandra, Storm, Cloudstack, SpamAssassin, Lucene(! -- the guts of ElasticSearch), Spark, .. hell, the list is fairly endless. Yes they adopt a lot of code (OpenOffice!) and weird abstract crapware, but this is not quite the norm. If you measure the success of the average Apache project, I'm certain it is vastly higher than any comparable organization, although I'm not sure who you could compare Apache to.. GNU?
  - geodel 10y ago
    Not much to disagree here. The success of Apache Http and Tomcat server will itself lift average success rate by quite a bit. Others if successful are mainly a vendor driven version of software.
rectang 10y ago
Apache is biased towards giving communities a chance. Costs are low -- for about 200 projects, the ASF runs on a budget of around 1.4 million USD per year. It doesn't take that much to give a community a home -- the community itself is primarily responsible for making things happen.
TylerJewell 10y ago
I am the project lead for Eclipse Che - developer workspace server and cloud IDE. The core of this project came out of Codenvy. Three years ago we were searching for the right governance model and community to open source Che from Codenvy. We originally started with Apache. We went that way because we did not have relationships with Eclipse Foundation, the Orion project - a perceived competitor at the time - was already there, and concerns over IBM having an outsized dominance / influence over the community. When we reached out to the Apache foundation to discuss the ways we could get our software into their foundation, building mentors, and also cross-project collaboration - we really struggled. We were unable to get the necessary endorsements. Apache was really bare bones governance. Because we couldn't get the right mentors, the proposal never made it out of an early proposal phase. Serendipity at the time had me accidentally meat the Orion project lead at the Eclipse Foundation. Conversations ensued, and a path for how Che could come to be a reality with the support of other vendors that wanted to get involved was laid out. And that lead to our ultimate path into Eclipse and promotion there. So this is an interesting back story about how one project ended up in Eclipse vs. Apache. Interestingly, Eclipse is opinionated about the projects they promote. They are topically focused and work for project cross-pollination along with driving marketing initatives and IP policies around driving adoption of their core underlying projects. So that is a bit of a departure from the Apache approach where each product is more autonomous in terms of its underlying promotion responsibilities. This plays a little bit to @dr_faustus comment on Apache being a place where many large projects are going - they can do that because the community already exists and they need the most structured infrastructure / process.
- gtirloni 10y ago
  I'm curious to understand where to draw the line between the need for governance/bureaucracy versus just releasing code on GitHub and being a good participant (reviewing PRs, running a mailing list, etc). Maybe whenever there are a dozen or so companies trying to create a business model so they don't fight each other too much? Has that ever worked with the high profile Apache projects that people remember here (OpenOffice, CouchDB, etC)?
  - TylerJewell 10y ago
mgr86 10y ago
maybe, in fact, reading some of these comments it feels like they have quite the collection there at Apache. But I personally find myself using Apache Lucene by way of Apahce Solr quite frequently. If we were a bigger organization I'd likely look at Zookeeper and Kafka as well. Alas the library market can be a small and depressing market.
agentgt 10y ago
I sort of agree and see that trend but on the other hand some projects are flourishing on Apache. My biggest gripe with the Apache community sphere is it is pain to contribute (I mentioned it here as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11121563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11121563) and there is often interesting politics that develop on the mailinglist between developers. It seems when you start talking but "organizational" + "community" things some interesting behaviors happen (like who is the head honcho and who should we kick out). On the other hand Apache does offer some continuity (in the event something happens to a lead developer) I suppose.
mavelikara 10y ago
Wasn't Geronimo and Harmony formed at Apache (and not donated by a commercial entity)?
hota_mazi 10y ago
You can add Groovy to that list.
- rectang 10y ago
  Since Groovy has come to Apache it has thrived, though. https://twitter.com/aalmiray/status/775614209442840576 https://twitter.com/aalmiray/status/775614209442840576
  - hota_mazi 10y ago
    The Groovy download numbers have been infamously inflated [1] Besides, most Groovy downloads come from Gradle. Hardly anyone starts a new project with Groovy, it's become a niche language used exclusively to write build files. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107241
    - vorg 10y ago
      Nowadays if you check bintray for Groovy downloads, virtually all of them come from Germany, which is where the server hosting the groovy-lang.org site is located. Gradle 3.0, which came out last month, has replaced Groovy with Kotlin as its prefered choice for writing build scripts and plugins, so expect Groovy's use for build scripts to decrease. I think Groovy will live long for scripting on the JVM, in the same way Bash is used for Linux. All the extra cruft Groovy bundles (e.g. MOP, static typing) will become irrelevant over time.
    - oldmanjay 10y ago
      "People only use groovy to get shit done" is not an argument in favor of groovy dying.
coolspot 10y ago
Also a lot of projects succeed under Apache. NetBeans is great piece of software and it is not even remotely close to die.
tn13 10y ago
Isn't Apache a community itself ? Should not it be left to the community to decide if they want to support that given project. Apache itself can abandon the project if there are not contributors.
jimjag 10y ago
"Is it me or has Apache increasingly become the place open source projects of big companies go to die? OpenOffice, Geronimo, Harmony, Wave, etc.pp." It's just you :) Seriously though, that is a mistaken impression, bolstered by people who have a vested interest in that impression. Instead, Apache is a place where large open source projects of big companies go to build an independent and healthy community around the project. Sometimes it doesn't work out, for numerous reasons, but most of the time the change is one of the best things to happen to the project.

orionblastar 10y ago

Actually I think this is the way that FOSS projects are designed. If one group can't maintain it, another can take it over. Netbeans was fine for a while and then better tools came out. I used Frontpage and Visual Interdev in the mid to late 1990s, discovered Netbeans later on. I remember downloading Netbeans with the Java SDK.

johnhenry 10y ago

Arguably, it's not where open-source projects go to die, but rather, where we send projects that should die, but we're just not ready to let them go.

sspiff 10y ago

I was thinking the same thing. Many big open source projects are "entrusted" to Apache after their funding/support is cut off. Why is Apache taking these up / wasting time on them? So far all of them have died shortly after, with no significant improvements landing once Apache has taken over.

ricksplat 10y ago
> Why is Apache taking these up / wasting time on them? Presumably they get some funding in return. It makes $$$ sense for those entrusting if they have an established user base they no longer want to support.
- jimjag 10y ago
  The discussions and rationale for accepting any and all projects is done on-list, on the public Incubator threads. There are no "side deals" or "arrangements" other that was is opening and publicly discussed. In any case, any sort of quid-pro-quo about funding is NOT part of the equation.
  - ricksplat 10y ago
    I didn't mean there were "side deals" I just presumed that funding for Apache came from somewhere and this is surely somewhat from the organisations that donate technology. To say it's NOT part of the equation is naive at best, disingenuous at worst. Money is ALWAYS part of the equation.
    - ricksplat 10y ago
      http://www.apache.org/foundation/thanks.html http://www.apache.org/foundation/thanks.html
toopok4k3 10y ago
Because the software still works and can be used by someone. Sure they might not be maintained and bug fixes wont happen. If the software does something that has no free alternative, the Apache one can still be used by someone for something to fill a need somewhere. Yeah I know this is an absurd concept (to some) that someone might use older than a few year old tech. Being an Apache project means(to me at least) that the product is ready to use and someone has used it before with at least some success. I trust a random open source product much less than anything Apache.
vorg 10y ago
> Many big open source projects are "entrusted" to Apache after their funding/support is cut off Although "entrusted" to Apache, they're still controlled by the same people who change their titles from XXXX Project Manager at BigCorp to Apache PMS Chair for XXXX. These people are often the reason the project funding is cut off, and they'd rather keep control of a shrinking ecosystem than give up some control so the project can be saved, where they'd have a smaller share of a larger ecosystem.

jsight 10y ago

People used to say that the surest sign of death for a project was to get a domain at Apache.org. This goes back at least ten years.

moondowner 10y ago
It's still the same... "OpenOffice, after years of neglect, could shut down" http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/09/openoffice-after-years-of-neglect-could-shut-down/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/09/openof...

geodel 10y ago

It is not you. If you look closely at Apache projects. They are mostly Java type projects in various state of completion. Some are either failed at corporates and hence dumped there (struts, cordova and so on) or too experimental and hence good place get wider audience. If successful the main sponsor will add proprietary features/components and sell product and/or support(e.g Hadoop ecosystem components). Some exceptions to this are Apache Http server, tomcat, svn etc.

DashRattlesnake 10y ago
> struts Wasn't Struts a once-popular non-failure whose time has passed; rather than a corporate failure that was "dumped"?
smrtinsert 10y ago
I look at the project list and I think the great majority are not dead and abandoned. They are not the hottest list of tech but they are stable and used.
- andrewbinstock 10y ago
  That's in part because the dead ones and the dump-ware are migrated by Apache to the "attic."
_wmd 10y ago
There are plenty of live and popular Apache projects that get plenty of press time: Zookeeper, Hadooop, CouchDB, Cassandra, Storm, Cloudstack, SpamAssassin, Lucene(! -- the guts of ElasticSearch), Spark, .. hell, the list is fairly endless. Yes they adopt a lot of code (OpenOffice!) and weird abstract crapware, but this is not quite the norm. If you measure the success of the average Apache project, I'm certain it is vastly higher than any comparable organization, although I'm not sure who you could compare Apache to.. GNU?
- geodel 10y ago
  Not much to disagree here. The success of Apache Http and Tomcat server will itself lift average success rate by quite a bit. Others if successful are mainly a vendor driven version of software.

rectang 10y ago

Apache is biased towards giving communities a chance. Costs are low -- for about 200 projects, the ASF runs on a budget of around 1.4 million USD per year. It doesn't take that much to give a community a home -- the community itself is primarily responsible for making things happen.

TylerJewell 10y ago

I am the project lead for Eclipse Che - developer workspace server and cloud IDE. The core of this project came out of Codenvy. Three years ago we were searching for the right governance model and community to open source Che from Codenvy. We originally started with Apache. We went that way because we did not have relationships with Eclipse Foundation, the Orion project - a perceived competitor at the time - was already there, and concerns over IBM having an outsized dominance / influence over the community. When we reached out to the Apache foundation to discuss the ways we could get our software into their foundation, building mentors, and also cross-project collaboration - we really struggled. We were unable to get the necessary endorsements. Apache was really bare bones governance. Because we couldn't get the right mentors, the proposal never made it out of an early proposal phase. Serendipity at the time had me accidentally meat the Orion project lead at the Eclipse Foundation. Conversations ensued, and a path for how Che could come to be a reality with the support of other vendors that wanted to get involved was laid out. And that lead to our ultimate path into Eclipse and promotion there. So this is an interesting back story about how one project ended up in Eclipse vs. Apache. Interestingly, Eclipse is opinionated about the projects they promote. They are topically focused and work for project cross-pollination along with driving marketing initatives and IP policies around driving adoption of their core underlying projects. So that is a bit of a departure from the Apache approach where each product is more autonomous in terms of its underlying promotion responsibilities. This plays a little bit to @dr_faustus comment on Apache being a place where many large projects are going - they can do that because the community already exists and they need the most structured infrastructure / process.

gtirloni 10y ago
I'm curious to understand where to draw the line between the need for governance/bureaucracy versus just releasing code on GitHub and being a good participant (reviewing PRs, running a mailing list, etc). Maybe whenever there are a dozen or so companies trying to create a business model so they don't fight each other too much? Has that ever worked with the high profile Apache projects that people remember here (OpenOffice, CouchDB, etC)?
- TylerJewell 10y ago

mgr86 10y ago

maybe, in fact, reading some of these comments it feels like they have quite the collection there at Apache. But I personally find myself using Apache Lucene by way of Apahce Solr quite frequently. If we were a bigger organization I'd likely look at Zookeeper and Kafka as well. Alas the library market can be a small and depressing market.

agentgt 10y ago

I sort of agree and see that trend but on the other hand some projects are flourishing on Apache. My biggest gripe with the Apache community sphere is it is pain to contribute (I mentioned it here as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11121563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11121563) and there is often interesting politics that develop on the mailinglist between developers. It seems when you start talking but "organizational" + "community" things some interesting behaviors happen (like who is the head honcho and who should we kick out). On the other hand Apache does offer some continuity (in the event something happens to a lead developer) I suppose.

mavelikara 10y ago

Wasn't Geronimo and Harmony formed at Apache (and not donated by a commercial entity)?

hota_mazi 10y ago

You can add Groovy to that list.

rectang 10y ago
Since Groovy has come to Apache it has thrived, though. https://twitter.com/aalmiray/status/775614209442840576 https://twitter.com/aalmiray/status/775614209442840576
- hota_mazi 10y ago
  The Groovy download numbers have been infamously inflated [1] Besides, most Groovy downloads come from Gradle. Hardly anyone starts a new project with Groovy, it's become a niche language used exclusively to write build files. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107241
  - vorg 10y ago
    Nowadays if you check bintray for Groovy downloads, virtually all of them come from Germany, which is where the server hosting the groovy-lang.org site is located. Gradle 3.0, which came out last month, has replaced Groovy with Kotlin as its prefered choice for writing build scripts and plugins, so expect Groovy's use for build scripts to decrease. I think Groovy will live long for scripting on the JVM, in the same way Bash is used for Linux. All the extra cruft Groovy bundles (e.g. MOP, static typing) will become irrelevant over time.
  - oldmanjay 10y ago
    "People only use groovy to get shit done" is not an argument in favor of groovy dying.

coolspot 10y ago

Also a lot of projects succeed under Apache. NetBeans is great piece of software and it is not even remotely close to die.

tn13 10y ago

Isn't Apache a community itself ? Should not it be left to the community to decide if they want to support that given project. Apache itself can abandon the project if there are not contributors.

jimjag 10y ago

"Is it me or has Apache increasingly become the place open source projects of big companies go to die? OpenOffice, Geronimo, Harmony, Wave, etc.pp." It's just you :) Seriously though, that is a mistaken impression, bolstered by people who have a vested interest in that impression. Instead, Apache is a place where large open source projects of big companies go to build an independent and healthy community around the project. Sometimes it doesn't work out, for numerous reasons, but most of the time the change is one of the best things to happen to the project.