Has the Apache Software Foundation Lost Its Way? 126
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.'"
Re:Name me some quality Apache products (Score:5, Informative)
Solr, hadoop, activemq?
Seriously.
Re:Name me some quality Apache products (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Name me some quality Apache products (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Name me some quality Apache products (Score:1, Informative)
Ant, OpenOffice, HTTPD - all of which are best-in-class for serious use. Of course, there are other options for people who like playing with toys that resemble tools adults use.
Re:Keeping OpenOffice Trademark a disgrace (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Wordcount in statusbar (Score:4, Informative)
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!