19 ms·

Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

476 points by moritzplassnig 7y ago

philshem 7y ago
I didn't find any link to their GitHub profile in the blogs or press releases: https://github.com/apache/ https://github.com/apache/
- bredren 7y ago
  I wonder how long this name was reserved and by whom.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    GitHub is generally pretty loose when it comes to reassigning accounts owned by squatters.
    - protomyth 7y ago
      Although the Apache Software Foundation is considered a squatter themselves by some folks.
      - joking 7y ago
        why is that?
        smudgymcscmudge 7y ago
        I think they are saying that an apache tribe should have that username.
        idoubtit 7y ago
        I suppose it is because of the feud between OpenOffice (Apache) and LibreOffice (Document Foundation). For years, OpenOffice has been Apache's most downloaded project[1]. But it is only because of the past glory of this name when Sun promoted it, and by confusion with LibreOffice. When Apache was given OpenOffice by Oracle, they let the code rot, with just a few dozens commits a year. IIRC, their strict access policies lead them to reject the initial cooperation offers from the Document Foundation. So the Document Foundation "dropped" OpenOffice and created the fork LibreOffice (from Go-OpenOffice). Circa 2011, there were many angry post about this. [1]: The home page of "Apache OpenOffice" claims: "Over 3.2 million downloads of Apache OpenOffice 4.1.5 ".
        Macha 7y ago
        I'm pretty sure Tomcat and the Apache HTTPd get more downloads than that, it's just harder to measure as they usually come from package repositories for various Linux distros or homebrew.
        idoubtit 7y ago
        When Apache published OpenOffice 4.0, there were about a million download per week, for a total of 85M downloads in 2.5 years[1]. Fortunately, that is no more the case. OpenOffice is in maintenance mode (last minor features were 5 years ago). So, even if the project seems alive at first glance, its user base is thinning out. [1]: https://blogs.apache.org/OOo/entry/apache_openoffice_in_2013_a https://blogs.apache.org/OOo/entry/apache_openoffice_in_2013...
        protomyth 7y ago
        The various Apache tribes.
        bredren 7y ago
        I had not thought about the naming of Apache the software despite it describing so many "Native American people inhabiting the southwest United States and northern Mexico." I also realize now the use of a feather as the logo. Previous HN discussion on the Apache software relationship with the Apache people: Apache Rewrites History: Why is it Named “Apache”? [2013] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5536134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5536134
        protomyth 7y ago
        I participated in that discussion, and it was a scummy rewrite of history then. As far as I can tell, they have no relationship to any of the various Apache tribes.
  - markphip 7y ago
    The ASF has used this for years. Except for a few projects that have been piloting using GitHub it was mainly used as mirror repositories for repositories hosted at the ASF.
- rc_kas 7y ago
  Over 1600 repositories. Sheez apache is big.
  - yread 7y ago
    And they are still importing it seems. It shows 1761 to me
snazz 7y ago
It confuses me why so many traditionally pro-FOSS projects move to a not-free-nor-open tool like GitHub. Do they think that they’ll get enough new contributors this way to offset the (more than slight) irony?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  I wonder if there are plans to mirror GitHub’s supplemental content (issues, etc.)
  - snazz 7y ago
    I’ve heard that GitHub makes that intentionally hard. Have you seen a repository that comes from Google Code? All the issues are always messed up that way.
- atonse 7y ago
  Better participation. A lot more people know how to use GitHub's tools. It'll likely increase the amount of development, participation, pull requests, etc that ASF projects get. Does it matter that GitHub themselves is not open source?
  - dijit 7y ago
    > Does it matter that GitHub themselves is not open source? It matters a lot actually; a lot of free-software/open source software are licensed that way because the projects themselves are ideologically predisposed. While that does not hold true for certain (even large) projects like Linux, it certainly holds true for Apache (historically) and GNU. To put it another way; if you found out GNU coreutils were hosted on Window machines using IIS web servers then you would probably consider that the people making the software (or, certainly those hosting it) are ideologically at odds with the project and are hypocritical. So, I mean, you get to choose, if you go the Linux way and say "we are open source for pragmatic reasons" then there's no doublethink. If you say "we believe that all software should be free" while simultaneously forcing your users to contribute using closed source software on a proprietary platform then then you're not practicing your ideology, and worse; you're forcing that non-practice on your developers and users.
atonse 7y ago
I found this title very confusing. I thought it was the equivalent of their non-profit being absorbed by GitHub. Meaning, the corporate structure." Why don't they just say that Apache will officially host their repositories on GitHub moving forward?
- nevi-me 7y ago
  I agree, also find it confusing. I thought this meant moving from JIRA to GH, but I suppose this announces something that users and contributors of Apache projects wouldn't have thought of; that the was an active decision to move to GitHub. The move is confusing also because I thought Apache were migrating to their own git server, I think late last year or early this year.
  - TallGuyShort 7y ago
    They just finished migrating to Gitbox, but GitHub mirrors have been used for a long time and some projects have been using pull requests more in lieu of reviewing patches on JIRA.
- jwilk 7y ago
  The ASF press release (https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-software-foundation-expands https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-softwar...) title is better: The Apache® Software Foundation Expands Infrastructure with GitHub Integration
- nimbius 7y ago
  Because the writer, Bryan Clark, is Director of Product for OSS Maintainers and is trying to contextualize the move to feature the company he works for, not the code thats been around for far longer. "apache moves to github" makes it sound like apache made a rote and boring switch, which this sort of is. They just as easily could have moved to sourceforge or gitlab. joining a team has implications that github (c) works together with open source. while it certainly hosts a lot of it, github isnt open source. Headlining this as your "open source community" also helps avoid the uncomfortable issue of an open source product moving to a completely proprietary system for CI and development.
fxfan 7y ago
And the 3 dozen GitHub to Gitlab migrants are trying to find ways to come back while still saving face. I have personally seen people who, for example, not only use powershell (on Linux of all places) but also build tooling around it and file issues on the GitHub repo. The same people left GitHub when MS acquired it.
geodel 7y ago
I am quite happy about it. There are large number of very useful libraries and infrastructure projects (along with J2EE inspired frameworks which I have decided to ignore) which remain essential for Java related software development.
liveoneggs 7y ago
I hope projects will get rid of JIRA now!
- fs111 7y ago
  This is unlikely since not all projects use git and they seem to like to have the same workflow everywhere
- neurotrace 7y ago
  I recently moved to a company that uses Jira. What kinds of problems should I be looking out for?
  - giancarlostoro 7y ago
    Issues with JIRA are mostly seen as you use it for different companies and projects. Everyone sets it up differently. It is like Excel for ticketing. I didnt care much for Trac in comparison but I can appreciate that the UI always remained consistent.
  - liveoneggs 7y ago
    There is some kind of issue with ASF's JIRA not being indexed by search engines, which makes discovery of problems more difficult than it should be. ASF gets their JIRA hosting gratis so I don't think they have much recourse.
  - mdaniel 7y ago
    If it's the cloud hosted version (I can't speak to their on-prem software since I haven't used it in a few years), watch out for the nonsense that is having two separate markup languages, used it two different contexts. The original "Atlassian markup" (made famous by Confluence) is used, as best I can tell, in issue creation and descriptions, whereas some kind of Markdown hybrid is used in issue comments Be careful if you use subtasks for issues, which may sound like a perfectly reasonable work breakdown idea but subtasks are snowflakes in Jira and become very hard to have visibility into, assign points to, etc The rest of the rant I'll omit, since it's more rooted in my personal hatred for their products and has less substantiation
paule89 7y ago
So the "Open Apache Graveyard" is moving to github, for better visibility, interaction, and where the users are. Thats a good move. Although most of the software from the "Open Apache Graveyard" like OpenOffice and others is kinda dead already. Just my very biased IMHO.
- xorcist 7y ago
  That's silly. Most projects on Github are "kind of dead" too. It's not like the ASF doesn't have active projects too.
jwilk 7y ago
From the ASF press release: > In February 2019, the migration to GitHub was complete, and the ASF's own git service was decommissioned. I'm confused. https://git.apache.org/ https://git.apache.org/ doesn't look decommissioned.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > I'm confused. https://git.apache.org/ https://git.apache.org/ doesn't look decommissioned. That's a read-only mirror service. OTOH, https://gitbox.apache.org https://gitbox.apache.org doesn't look decommissioned, either.
latchkey 7y ago
In 2009, I brought the idea of using github up on the members@ list and was called a troll. Agreed, at the time, the message was trolling... https://imgur.com/a/JPQtCQ4 https://imgur.com/a/JPQtCQ4 I brought it up again later in 2010 and 2011 on the members@ list too. Lots of discussion with the general consensus that it wouldn't happen because it isn't an 'open' platform. I even wrote a blog post about it in 2011, which was also discussed on members@ and in the blog comments... http://lookfirst.com/2011/11/contributing-to-open-source.html http://lookfirst.com/2011/11/contributing-to-open-source.htm... Even though it took 10 years, I'm glad to see it finally happen.
- brabel 7y ago
  Nice effort. Some people are slower to adapt than others... as you say in your blog post, GitHub (or something like it) was always going to be much more attractive for people to contribute than the "old ways" of mailing lists... but there's always the risk you'll invest on a platform that will be dead in 2 years. So being conservative is necessary for larger organizations.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    Is it Microsoft's acquisition that's won Apache over? (Though my first thought was 'wow, in bed with the devil'.)
- dblock 7y ago
  Congrats.
revskill 7y ago
When i see a person solve a problem with a Github repo, the first thing i try to know is that: What's the problem he's trying to solve. Then i ask myself: OK, the problem is real, but what about generalizing it ? Tons of OSS projects focus more on generalizing solutions, not problems. And it's the problem with OSS.
GordonS 7y ago
For many years now, it's felt like Apache software foundation is where projects go to die. It's a shame its taken so long, but I'm glad to see this news - it's pretty much guaranteed to increase participation in Apache projects.
- diehunde 7y ago
  What do you mean to die? Projects like Kafka, Airflow and Spark are widely used today and the teams are constantly releasing new features.
  - GordonS 7y ago
    Apache has a few big hitters, yes, but for dozens more it's been more akin to a tomb than an incubator. I really believe a large part of the reason for that has been their dogged determination to stay off GitHub.
    - hnbroseph 7y ago
      what percentage of repos on github would be legitimately considered "active"?
  - MrPowers 7y ago
    This has been my observation as well - projects flourish under the Apache umbrella. Parquet and Arrow are also widely used and will probably continue gaining importance. A Rust big data engine, similar to Apache Spark, was just donated to the Apache Arrow project (it's called DataFusion: https://github.com/andygrove/datafusion https://github.com/andygrove/datafusion). From what I can tell, Apache already has a lot of important projects and is adding new ones that will continue to grow.
saurik 7y ago
Apparently, one of the big motivating reasons for this was "cost". > The foundation’s 2018 five-year strategic plan noted that infrastructure services account for more than 80 percent of the total ASF expense budget, adding: “Increasingly, project communities have infrastructure requirements that strain the capabilities of the ASF.” > The report noted that, given burgeoning costs, encouraging the use of more externally provided services was its best option. (“Using a simple growth forecast to project expenses and effective governance and mentoring to ensure that using externally provided services does not in any way present barriers to entry to projects or reduce transparency, inclusiveness and diversity.”) https://www.cbronline.com/news/apache-software-foundation-github https://www.cbronline.com/news/apache-software-foundation-gi... Given that I find ASF has always been very moral with their fundraising and careful with their money (unlike a couple other major non-profits I happily would name in any other context), as disappointed as I am with this decision, it is difficult for me to blame them for making it: git is extremely difficult to scale correctly (due to its reliance on interactive protocols), which led Google Code and then GitHub to rewrite large portions of it (of course, as closed source internal-only this-is-our-competitive-advantage projects); when you are a small non-profit, knowing that you would have 5x the resources for staffing if you just swapped out some mere tooling has got to be a really really tough choice for something that isn't quite your core moral (as it would be with say, the FSF).
- pedrocx486 7y ago
  >as disappointed as I am with this decision May I ask why? Them moving doesn't look like an issue to me at least.
  - Phrodo_00 7y ago
    Personally, my only gripe (even though it's not a huge deal) is I'd have preferred it if they used hosting that actaully was open source (like gitlab)
    - GordonS 7y ago
      That would decrease costs, but would it meaningfully increase community participation?
jeena 7y ago
I guess GitHub right now is like Facebook was in 2012, everybody is on it, it's a super vibrant community, it's backed by a huge amount of money, it locks you in (at least with wiki, issues, URLs). And a second guess is that it will also do what Facebook does, getting out of control by trying to monetize on its monopoly. It's just so mega ironic that the whole Open Source movement collectively decided that for a little bit of convenience they're more than OK to let Microsoft host their stuff and to sacrifice so much freedom (and especially the URL which does the lock-in to GitHub).
- blocked_again 7y ago
  Lucky for us GitHub unlike Facebook don't rely on selling advertisments to make revenue. Plus git is decentralised. You can migrate your entire code anywhere you want. As far as issues are concerned I am pretty sure competitors like GitLab supports exporting them via GitHubs awesome API. It's not as bad as make you sound it. Things could have been much more worse.
  - rrix2 7y ago
    I can migrate my code, but not all my consumers which use "github.com/my/package" as the import qualifiers all over the place.
    - blocked_again 7y ago
      Doesn't setting up a mirror solve the issue ? https://help.github.com/en/articles/about-github-mirrors https://help.github.com/en/articles/about-github-mirrors
    - brodock 7y ago
      GitHub doesn't provide you with any standard way to migrate the related metadata, but unlike Atlassian's Bitbucket, which doesn't make everything accessible with their APIs, it's possible to get all the data with GitHub's API (as of today). If you use GitLab importer tool, we migrate everything from your old project. All issues, all pull requests, and we even migrate inline comments inside a pull request. All it takes is one OAuth authorization and the pressing of a button. When inside GitLab, we even give you an Export zip file, that you can import in your hosted version of GitLab (or use any alternative, that can read our export file format).
jkingsbery 7y ago
So... I guess this April fool's Jira from a few year's ago might actually come to fruition? https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524 https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524
blograbbit 7y ago
Does apple really make any software that is that complicated? http://www.usionly.xyz/27/04/2019/repixel-ad-network-review-make-20-daily-without-displaying-banner-ads/76/ad-networks-review/ http://www.usionly.xyz/27/04/2019/repixel-ad-network-review-...
lars_francke 7y ago
I believe the ASF blog[1] to have a much better title: "The Apache® Software Foundation Expands Infrastructure with GitHub Integration" "joins" sounds very wrong to me. Apache has had a Github account for years and the mirrors have existed for years as well. The ASF still hosts their own Git repositories at https://gitbox.apache.org/ https://gitbox.apache.org/ In fact all ASF projects needed to migrate from the old git-wip to gitbox just recently (December 2018) [2] and in that announcement they said: "When your project has moved, you are free to use either the ASF repository system (gitbox.apache.org) OR GitHub for your development and code pushes" So I believe the ASF still hosts a fully up-to-date git repository for each of their projects that use git. It's just that the integration has gotten much better between ASF infrastructure (e.g. Jira) and Github. [1] <https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-software-foundation-expands> https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-softwar... [2] <https://blogs.apache.org/infra/entry/relocation-of-apache-git-repositories> https://blogs.apache.org/infra/entry/relocation-of-apache-gi...
- zaat 7y ago
  According to the announcement: >In February 2019, the migration to GitHub was complete, and the ASF's own git service was decommissioned. P.S - the links you provided are not formatted correctly, and leads to 404 pages due to trailing '>'
  - lars_francke 7y ago
    Sorry for the broken links. Yes, you are correct, that's what it says in the announcement but that is not correct. The "old" ASF git stuff was decommissioned, yes. It's a bit misleading. A more detailed explanation has been put up here: https://blogs.apache.org/infra/entry/apache-and-github-a-friendly https://blogs.apache.org/infra/entry/apache-and-github-a-fri...
ShaneCurcuru 7y ago
Important clarifications: - The announcement is only about technology, there's no "partnership" between the ASF and GitHub. The ASF is vendor-neutral about all of it's operations. In particular, there is an expectation that Apache project communities continue to do much of their community and release management on ASF servers, not solely on GitHub. - Many Apache projects asked to use GitHub. It took a while, but Apache infra now allows that, as long as the repos are in our organization. Many projects still use our Subversion repo(s) too. - The ASF hosts it's own Git repos with all auditable history. So GitHub is merely one way that Apache projects can choose to allow users to contribute. If GitHub went away overnight, the ASF would still have all our own code and could keep working with our own build tools and plain old `git`. The ASF didn't decommission it's own git repos, just some of the tooling we used to mirror between our repos and GitHub. Lars elsethread brought up a useful ASF blog post: https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-software-foundation-expands https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-softwar... And yes, https://github.com/apache https://github.com/apache is the ASF.
- stephenr 7y ago
  Is the tooling decommissioned because you’re using alternatives or because you’re no longer mirroring repos?

I didn't find any link to their GitHub profile in the blogs or press releases: https://github.com/apache/ https://github.com/apache/

bredren 7y ago
I wonder how long this name was reserved and by whom.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  GitHub is generally pretty loose when it comes to reassigning accounts owned by squatters.
  - protomyth 7y ago
    Although the Apache Software Foundation is considered a squatter themselves by some folks.
    - joking 7y ago
      why is that?
      - smudgymcscmudge 7y ago
        I think they are saying that an apache tribe should have that username.
      - idoubtit 7y ago
        I suppose it is because of the feud between OpenOffice (Apache) and LibreOffice (Document Foundation). For years, OpenOffice has been Apache's most downloaded project[1]. But it is only because of the past glory of this name when Sun promoted it, and by confusion with LibreOffice. When Apache was given OpenOffice by Oracle, they let the code rot, with just a few dozens commits a year. IIRC, their strict access policies lead them to reject the initial cooperation offers from the Document Foundation. So the Document Foundation "dropped" OpenOffice and created the fork LibreOffice (from Go-OpenOffice). Circa 2011, there were many angry post about this. [1]: The home page of "Apache OpenOffice" claims: "Over 3.2 million downloads of Apache OpenOffice 4.1.5 ".
        Macha 7y ago
        I'm pretty sure Tomcat and the Apache HTTPd get more downloads than that, it's just harder to measure as they usually come from package repositories for various Linux distros or homebrew.
        idoubtit 7y ago
        When Apache published OpenOffice 4.0, there were about a million download per week, for a total of 85M downloads in 2.5 years[1]. Fortunately, that is no more the case. OpenOffice is in maintenance mode (last minor features were 5 years ago). So, even if the project seems alive at first glance, its user base is thinning out. [1]: https://blogs.apache.org/OOo/entry/apache_openoffice_in_2013_a https://blogs.apache.org/OOo/entry/apache_openoffice_in_2013...
      - protomyth 7y ago
        The various Apache tribes.
        bredren 7y ago
        I had not thought about the naming of Apache the software despite it describing so many "Native American people inhabiting the southwest United States and northern Mexico." I also realize now the use of a feather as the logo. Previous HN discussion on the Apache software relationship with the Apache people: Apache Rewrites History: Why is it Named “Apache”? [2013] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5536134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5536134
        protomyth 7y ago
        I participated in that discussion, and it was a scummy rewrite of history then. As far as I can tell, they have no relationship to any of the various Apache tribes.
- markphip 7y ago
  The ASF has used this for years. Except for a few projects that have been piloting using GitHub it was mainly used as mirror repositories for repositories hosted at the ASF.
rc_kas 7y ago
Over 1600 repositories. Sheez apache is big.
- yread 7y ago
  And they are still importing it seems. It shows 1761 to me

snazz 7y ago

It confuses me why so many traditionally pro-FOSS projects move to a not-free-nor-open tool like GitHub. Do they think that they’ll get enough new contributors this way to offset the (more than slight) irony?

saagarjha 7y ago
I wonder if there are plans to mirror GitHub’s supplemental content (issues, etc.)
- snazz 7y ago
  I’ve heard that GitHub makes that intentionally hard. Have you seen a repository that comes from Google Code? All the issues are always messed up that way.
atonse 7y ago
Better participation. A lot more people know how to use GitHub's tools. It'll likely increase the amount of development, participation, pull requests, etc that ASF projects get. Does it matter that GitHub themselves is not open source?
- dijit 7y ago
  > Does it matter that GitHub themselves is not open source? It matters a lot actually; a lot of free-software/open source software are licensed that way because the projects themselves are ideologically predisposed. While that does not hold true for certain (even large) projects like Linux, it certainly holds true for Apache (historically) and GNU. To put it another way; if you found out GNU coreutils were hosted on Window machines using IIS web servers then you would probably consider that the people making the software (or, certainly those hosting it) are ideologically at odds with the project and are hypocritical. So, I mean, you get to choose, if you go the Linux way and say "we are open source for pragmatic reasons" then there's no doublethink. If you say "we believe that all software should be free" while simultaneously forcing your users to contribute using closed source software on a proprietary platform then then you're not practicing your ideology, and worse; you're forcing that non-practice on your developers and users.

atonse 7y ago

I found this title very confusing. I thought it was the equivalent of their non-profit being absorbed by GitHub. Meaning, the corporate structure." Why don't they just say that Apache will officially host their repositories on GitHub moving forward?

nevi-me 7y ago
I agree, also find it confusing. I thought this meant moving from JIRA to GH, but I suppose this announces something that users and contributors of Apache projects wouldn't have thought of; that the was an active decision to move to GitHub. The move is confusing also because I thought Apache were migrating to their own git server, I think late last year or early this year.
- TallGuyShort 7y ago
  They just finished migrating to Gitbox, but GitHub mirrors have been used for a long time and some projects have been using pull requests more in lieu of reviewing patches on JIRA.
jwilk 7y ago
The ASF press release (https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-software-foundation-expands https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-softwar...) title is better: The Apache® Software Foundation Expands Infrastructure with GitHub Integration
nimbius 7y ago
Because the writer, Bryan Clark, is Director of Product for OSS Maintainers and is trying to contextualize the move to feature the company he works for, not the code thats been around for far longer. "apache moves to github" makes it sound like apache made a rote and boring switch, which this sort of is. They just as easily could have moved to sourceforge or gitlab. joining a team has implications that github (c) works together with open source. while it certainly hosts a lot of it, github isnt open source. Headlining this as your "open source community" also helps avoid the uncomfortable issue of an open source product moving to a completely proprietary system for CI and development.

fxfan 7y ago

And the 3 dozen GitHub to Gitlab migrants are trying to find ways to come back while still saving face. I have personally seen people who, for example, not only use powershell (on Linux of all places) but also build tooling around it and file issues on the GitHub repo. The same people left GitHub when MS acquired it.

geodel 7y ago

I am quite happy about it. There are large number of very useful libraries and infrastructure projects (along with J2EE inspired frameworks which I have decided to ignore) which remain essential for Java related software development.

liveoneggs 7y ago

I hope projects will get rid of JIRA now!

fs111 7y ago
This is unlikely since not all projects use git and they seem to like to have the same workflow everywhere
neurotrace 7y ago
I recently moved to a company that uses Jira. What kinds of problems should I be looking out for?
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  Issues with JIRA are mostly seen as you use it for different companies and projects. Everyone sets it up differently. It is like Excel for ticketing. I didnt care much for Trac in comparison but I can appreciate that the UI always remained consistent.
- liveoneggs 7y ago
  There is some kind of issue with ASF's JIRA not being indexed by search engines, which makes discovery of problems more difficult than it should be. ASF gets their JIRA hosting gratis so I don't think they have much recourse.
- mdaniel 7y ago
  If it's the cloud hosted version (I can't speak to their on-prem software since I haven't used it in a few years), watch out for the nonsense that is having two separate markup languages, used it two different contexts. The original "Atlassian markup" (made famous by Confluence) is used, as best I can tell, in issue creation and descriptions, whereas some kind of Markdown hybrid is used in issue comments Be careful if you use subtasks for issues, which may sound like a perfectly reasonable work breakdown idea but subtasks are snowflakes in Jira and become very hard to have visibility into, assign points to, etc The rest of the rant I'll omit, since it's more rooted in my personal hatred for their products and has less substantiation

paule89 7y ago

So the "Open Apache Graveyard" is moving to github, for better visibility, interaction, and where the users are. Thats a good move. Although most of the software from the "Open Apache Graveyard" like OpenOffice and others is kinda dead already. Just my very biased IMHO.

xorcist 7y ago
That's silly. Most projects on Github are "kind of dead" too. It's not like the ASF doesn't have active projects too.

jwilk 7y ago

From the ASF press release: > In February 2019, the migration to GitHub was complete, and the ASF's own git service was decommissioned. I'm confused. https://git.apache.org/ https://git.apache.org/ doesn't look decommissioned.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> I'm confused. https://git.apache.org/ https://git.apache.org/ doesn't look decommissioned. That's a read-only mirror service. OTOH, https://gitbox.apache.org https://gitbox.apache.org doesn't look decommissioned, either.

latchkey 7y ago

In 2009, I brought the idea of using github up on the members@ list and was called a troll. Agreed, at the time, the message was trolling... https://imgur.com/a/JPQtCQ4 https://imgur.com/a/JPQtCQ4 I brought it up again later in 2010 and 2011 on the members@ list too. Lots of discussion with the general consensus that it wouldn't happen because it isn't an 'open' platform. I even wrote a blog post about it in 2011, which was also discussed on members@ and in the blog comments... http://lookfirst.com/2011/11/contributing-to-open-source.html http://lookfirst.com/2011/11/contributing-to-open-source.htm... Even though it took 10 years, I'm glad to see it finally happen.

brabel 7y ago
Nice effort. Some people are slower to adapt than others... as you say in your blog post, GitHub (or something like it) was always going to be much more attractive for people to contribute than the "old ways" of mailing lists... but there's always the risk you'll invest on a platform that will be dead in 2 years. So being conservative is necessary for larger organizations.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  Is it Microsoft's acquisition that's won Apache over? (Though my first thought was 'wow, in bed with the devil'.)
dblock 7y ago
Congrats.

revskill 7y ago

When i see a person solve a problem with a Github repo, the first thing i try to know is that: What's the problem he's trying to solve. Then i ask myself: OK, the problem is real, but what about generalizing it ? Tons of OSS projects focus more on generalizing solutions, not problems. And it's the problem with OSS.

GordonS 7y ago

For many years now, it's felt like Apache software foundation is where projects go to die. It's a shame its taken so long, but I'm glad to see this news - it's pretty much guaranteed to increase participation in Apache projects.

diehunde 7y ago
What do you mean to die? Projects like Kafka, Airflow and Spark are widely used today and the teams are constantly releasing new features.
- GordonS 7y ago
  Apache has a few big hitters, yes, but for dozens more it's been more akin to a tomb than an incubator. I really believe a large part of the reason for that has been their dogged determination to stay off GitHub.
  - hnbroseph 7y ago
    what percentage of repos on github would be legitimately considered "active"?
- MrPowers 7y ago
  This has been my observation as well - projects flourish under the Apache umbrella. Parquet and Arrow are also widely used and will probably continue gaining importance. A Rust big data engine, similar to Apache Spark, was just donated to the Apache Arrow project (it's called DataFusion: https://github.com/andygrove/datafusion https://github.com/andygrove/datafusion). From what I can tell, Apache already has a lot of important projects and is adding new ones that will continue to grow.

saurik 7y ago

Apparently, one of the big motivating reasons for this was "cost". > The foundation’s 2018 five-year strategic plan noted that infrastructure services account for more than 80 percent of the total ASF expense budget, adding: “Increasingly, project communities have infrastructure requirements that strain the capabilities of the ASF.” > The report noted that, given burgeoning costs, encouraging the use of more externally provided services was its best option. (“Using a simple growth forecast to project expenses and effective governance and mentoring to ensure that using externally provided services does not in any way present barriers to entry to projects or reduce transparency, inclusiveness and diversity.”) https://www.cbronline.com/news/apache-software-foundation-github https://www.cbronline.com/news/apache-software-foundation-gi... Given that I find ASF has always been very moral with their fundraising and careful with their money (unlike a couple other major non-profits I happily would name in any other context), as disappointed as I am with this decision, it is difficult for me to blame them for making it: git is extremely difficult to scale correctly (due to its reliance on interactive protocols), which led Google Code and then GitHub to rewrite large portions of it (of course, as closed source internal-only this-is-our-competitive-advantage projects); when you are a small non-profit, knowing that you would have 5x the resources for staffing if you just swapped out some mere tooling has got to be a really really tough choice for something that isn't quite your core moral (as it would be with say, the FSF).

pedrocx486 7y ago
>as disappointed as I am with this decision May I ask why? Them moving doesn't look like an issue to me at least.
- Phrodo_00 7y ago
  Personally, my only gripe (even though it's not a huge deal) is I'd have preferred it if they used hosting that actaully was open source (like gitlab)
  - GordonS 7y ago
    That would decrease costs, but would it meaningfully increase community participation?

jeena 7y ago

I guess GitHub right now is like Facebook was in 2012, everybody is on it, it's a super vibrant community, it's backed by a huge amount of money, it locks you in (at least with wiki, issues, URLs). And a second guess is that it will also do what Facebook does, getting out of control by trying to monetize on its monopoly. It's just so mega ironic that the whole Open Source movement collectively decided that for a little bit of convenience they're more than OK to let Microsoft host their stuff and to sacrifice so much freedom (and especially the URL which does the lock-in to GitHub).

blocked_again 7y ago
Lucky for us GitHub unlike Facebook don't rely on selling advertisments to make revenue. Plus git is decentralised. You can migrate your entire code anywhere you want. As far as issues are concerned I am pretty sure competitors like GitLab supports exporting them via GitHubs awesome API. It's not as bad as make you sound it. Things could have been much more worse.
- rrix2 7y ago
  I can migrate my code, but not all my consumers which use "github.com/my/package" as the import qualifiers all over the place.
  - blocked_again 7y ago
    Doesn't setting up a mirror solve the issue ? https://help.github.com/en/articles/about-github-mirrors https://help.github.com/en/articles/about-github-mirrors
  - brodock 7y ago
    GitHub doesn't provide you with any standard way to migrate the related metadata, but unlike Atlassian's Bitbucket, which doesn't make everything accessible with their APIs, it's possible to get all the data with GitHub's API (as of today). If you use GitLab importer tool, we migrate everything from your old project. All issues, all pull requests, and we even migrate inline comments inside a pull request. All it takes is one OAuth authorization and the pressing of a button. When inside GitLab, we even give you an Export zip file, that you can import in your hosted version of GitLab (or use any alternative, that can read our export file format).

jkingsbery 7y ago

So... I guess this April fool's Jira from a few year's ago might actually come to fruition? https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524 https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524

blograbbit 7y ago

Does apple really make any software that is that complicated? http://www.usionly.xyz/27/04/2019/repixel-ad-network-review-make-20-daily-without-displaying-banner-ads/76/ad-networks-review/ http://www.usionly.xyz/27/04/2019/repixel-ad-network-review-...

lars_francke 7y ago

I believe the ASF blog[1] to have a much better title: "The Apache® Software Foundation Expands Infrastructure with GitHub Integration" "joins" sounds very wrong to me. Apache has had a Github account for years and the mirrors have existed for years as well. The ASF still hosts their own Git repositories at https://gitbox.apache.org/ https://gitbox.apache.org/ In fact all ASF projects needed to migrate from the old git-wip to gitbox just recently (December 2018) [2] and in that announcement they said: "When your project has moved, you are free to use either the ASF repository system (gitbox.apache.org) OR GitHub for your development and code pushes" So I believe the ASF still hosts a fully up-to-date git repository for each of their projects that use git. It's just that the integration has gotten much better between ASF infrastructure (e.g. Jira) and Github. [1] <https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-software-foundation-expands> https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-softwar... [2] <https://blogs.apache.org/infra/entry/relocation-of-apache-git-repositories> https://blogs.apache.org/infra/entry/relocation-of-apache-gi...

zaat 7y ago
According to the announcement: >In February 2019, the migration to GitHub was complete, and the ASF's own git service was decommissioned. P.S - the links you provided are not formatted correctly, and leads to 404 pages due to trailing '>'
- lars_francke 7y ago
  Sorry for the broken links. Yes, you are correct, that's what it says in the announcement but that is not correct. The "old" ASF git stuff was decommissioned, yes. It's a bit misleading. A more detailed explanation has been put up here: https://blogs.apache.org/infra/entry/apache-and-github-a-friendly https://blogs.apache.org/infra/entry/apache-and-github-a-fri...

ShaneCurcuru 7y ago

Important clarifications: - The announcement is only about technology, there's no "partnership" between the ASF and GitHub. The ASF is vendor-neutral about all of it's operations. In particular, there is an expectation that Apache project communities continue to do much of their community and release management on ASF servers, not solely on GitHub. - Many Apache projects asked to use GitHub. It took a while, but Apache infra now allows that, as long as the repos are in our organization. Many projects still use our Subversion repo(s) too. - The ASF hosts it's own Git repos with all auditable history. So GitHub is merely one way that Apache projects can choose to allow users to contribute. If GitHub went away overnight, the ASF would still have all our own code and could keep working with our own build tools and plain old `git`. The ASF didn't decommission it's own git repos, just some of the tooling we used to mirror between our repos and GitHub. Lars elsethread brought up a useful ASF blog post: https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-software-foundation-expands https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-softwar... And yes, https://github.com/apache https://github.com/apache is the ASF.

stephenr 7y ago
Is the tooling decommissioned because you’re using alternatives or because you’re no longer mirroring repos?