Speaking generally, companies aren't good at running community based open source projects -- their interests don't always align with what is best for an open so

Speaking generally, companies aren't good at running community based open source projects -- their interests don't always align with what is best for an open source project. When a project like Cassandra came to Apache, there were only a couple Facebook developers working on it -- and they had largely abandoned future work on it. After growing the community there are dozens of people today contributing patches from many independent companies -- this makes a much stronger product that will survive the whims of a single company, which is also what consumers of open source projects look for, a stable ecosystem that won't go away if X is bought by Oracle or another BigEvilCorporation. It remains to be seen if Wave will build a big enough community to be successful inside the ASF, but Cassandra is certainly one of the success stories.