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:3, Interesting)
Solr for starters
Linus is Awesome (Score:4, Interesting)
Not really any different to the FSF, and all they really have is the userland for GNU/Linux distributions. In 3 decades they *still* dont have a production kernel.
The FSF is just doing great, and their kernel is still being developed albeit not on the scale on the similarly licensed and awesome Linux. Which is kind of the point. The reality is the FSF does lots of things. The License still succeeded even if Linus values it for its Tit for Tat qualities as opposed to freedom, but its there, and its close enough to being free software. The also do a little more than a kernel. I someone who is not a Fruit Lover, I personally wished that they had got further with Gnash, a free Flash implementation. I hoped it would open up Flash Development with all the positives without the down sides.
The bottom Line is Linus is so Amazing
Re:Keeping OpenOffice Trademark a disgrace (Score:2, Interesting)
Could you elaborate on why LibreOffice is so much worse than OpenOffice? I use LibreOffice mostly for opening documents, or making some spreadsheets, so I have no idea what you're talking about (I mean, I'm no poweruser, for any serious documents I use TeX).
Re:Keeping OpenOffice Trademark a disgrace (Score:5, Interesting)
There are interface bugs (fonts occasionally not appearing in drop down menus). It is crashy with big documents and heavy formatting. They make usability changes based on niche interests (making word counts non-modal, for example) which disrupt power users and can't be turned off.
I quit using OpenOffice on principle when Oracle started FUD'ing commercial users with ad campaigns to sell enterprise editions, but regretted it instantly. I was losing a lot of time to the slow performance, crashes, unreliability and disruption to my workflow. So I guess my only objective measurement is that my job was taking longer at almost every step, and the frustrations were growing with each release.
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 forget most of the outright interface bugs. I do recall LibreOffice-Calc's font on tabs for sheets, is too small to read, and didn't respond to UI scaling.
The crashing was a big thing. TeX was before my time... if I were to use something other than a word processor for heavily formatted documents, I'd use HTML and CSS, which I've considered, except I don't know of a tool as convenient as File -> Export as PDF for making PDFs, from HTML.
That's the list I'm unable to purge from my memory, because of the many wasted hours I can't have back.
Betteridge's Law (Score:3, Interesting)
Once again we have a clear example of Betteridge's law of headlines [wikipedia.org]: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."