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: (Score:3)
Why, what makes LO's team more worthy? Both suites are in active development, have a distinctly different focus (AOO for general use, LO adds features** for science/math projects) -- and, most importantly, the OO team is responsible for all of the core general-use changes that LO customizes & builds upon. It would make logical sense that the core product aimed at general users would continue having its traditional name, while the derivative (whether it's Libre- or Go-) takes a different newer one.
**wh
Re: (Score:3)
Both suites are in active development, have a distinctly different focus
Except there is very little Development of OpenOffice and they have the same focus...in fact its ridiculous to suggest otherwise.
50 million cant be wrong (Score:1)
I agree. Best make decisions based on historic marketing and brand strength not technical merit ! Why user need feature ? Why user need real community when they have comfortable brand ?
Re: (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: (Score:2)
Don't bother the guy. He's just shillin'.
Re: (Score:1)
The hilarity of your comment could only be realized if you looked at my history of flinging hate at Oracle :)
http://thenthdoctor.wordpress.com/?s=oracle [wordpress.com]
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2928985&cid=40396955 [slashdot.org]
Based on a quick eye-sweep at your recent comments, we seem to agree on some things.
Funny pun, though :)
Re: (Score:1)
LibreOffice was not something completely new, it was based on an LGPL patchset that existed long before the project.
A lot of developers simply decided they'd rather join the _existing_ LGPL project than continue dealing with Oracle being idiots and failing to communicate. Or, if donating to Apache was an ad-hoc solution that wasn't planned before, Oracle was just being through and through idiots.
Either way, almost all Linux distributions have been "LibreOffice" long before the name came up, so which one is
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.
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!
Re: (Score:1)
Is it reliable about updating for your selection? Whole-document word counts are rarely useful to me, and LO's word count didn't work for selections when I uninstalled it. It always said my selection was 0 words long... or at least that was the case when I'd quadruple-click a paragraph to select it quickly.
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps not particularly helpful to you, but it works reliably for me.
On my currently open document my status bar says:
Words:324 Selected: 5
Re: (Score:1)
... but it works reliably for me
Are "works for me" comments ever helpful? Just because it works for you doesn't mean the OP's complaints are invalid. All it means is that it works for you, bully for you. Obviously you are not in the demographic w/ the configuration that brings out the bug .... so what? So you have contributed nothing by your comment .... and now neither have I.
Re: (Score:1)
Thanks for the reply. I also use character counts pretty often, though :-/ In any case, yeah... sticking with AOO (almost typed OOo out of habit) until it irks me. It's good to have alternatives generally, though I think AOO would benefit from having some of OOo's core team immigrate over from LO. La vie.
Re: (Score:2)
There are a number of libraries that will build a PDF from HTML+CSS. They aren't perfect, but they work.
Alternatively, there's always printing as a PDF, but I've never bothered to see if that treats all your elements properly (I assume it doesn't).
I've always hated the Adobe suite of web tools, but I can't imagine that Dreamweaver (or whatever it may be called these days) would have trouble building a PDF from HTML+CSS. Though, I wouldn't be surprised if that hunk of application did a poorer job than some
Re: (Score:2)
if I were to use something other than a word processor for heavily formatted documents, I'd use HTML and CSS
I think you'd be more productive writing in Postscript.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Okay, you got it! (Score:2)
I am hardly a 'power' user of office software. I use it at home for some spreadsheats and word processing. The current Libre Office version in my Ubuntu 12.04... release freezes up my whole machine in ways OpenOffice never did.
There you have it. Anectodal evidence, but it is one data point. I could care less which one I'm using, but OpenOffice did work much better for me.
Re: (Score:1)
I don't have a stake in this on either side, but I run LibreOffice on Fedora at home and sometimes look at work pptx files. They rarely render properly, text is the wrong size and overlapped, embedded images are missing. It might be a problem with our corporate template, some of the objects that are inserted, whatever. But it is not useful to me for viewing work presentations.
Incidentally, while on vacation this summer I found google docs couldn't render them right either on my iPad... I had to ask peop
Re: (Score:1)
Don't feed the trolls.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm using Impress at the moment to knock together a presentation and it's frustrating how many annoyances it has in comparison to Powerpoint - text rendering which jiggles kerning & spacing between chars depending on a box being in focus or not, highly irritating capitalization behaviour (JGit becomes Jgit even when I've added the spelling to the dictionary), numbe
Re: (Score:2)
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).
There is nothing wrong with OpenOffice it is developed, per the linked article, mainly be developers from IBM. LibreOffice is developed mainly by the original OpenOffice developers. Right now there are two similar code bases, but with time they will drift apart and follow the direction and vision of their developers and sponsors. The article about Andrew in the summary has more information on it and other Apache projects.
Re: (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.
Re: (Score:1)
See above reply to someone else who asked the same question :)
Nothing new (Score:2)
People leave, new people come. It ebbs and flows like everything else.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
if all of the decentralized projects are on github, then they are not decentralized... github is the center.
The repositories are decentralized; losing github wouldn't maroon the code. But other things are still centralized as far as I can see, notably including issue databases. That's not very important for a small project, but for a large one that's absolutely critical.
Re: (Score:1)
I know, right?
Slashdotters: as easily manipulated by their own water supply as any other human.
Name me some quality Apache products (Score:1, Troll)
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: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
So I guess by the same metric, Android isn't Linux either. It is called GNU/Linux, not GNU Linux, the difference being that it is the mix of both tools, not saying that Linux comes from GNU.
Re: (Score:3)
Calling it GNU/Linux is suggesting that Linux is just as much a part of the GNU project, as much as gcc, flex, bison, bash, gawk, gdb, and other tools. It is not. It's Linux... not GNU/Linux... the prefix was added by people who simply got tired of waiting for Hurd when Linux did everything that they wanted, and serendipitously was also released under the GPL, but it was not ever part of the GNU project, so GNU/Linux is as much of a misnomer as BSD Linux (since Linux can be distributed with BSD tools ins
Re: (Score:1)
"the prefix was added by people who simply got tired of waiting for Hurd"
Wrong : the prefix was added by Richard Stallman himself, who wanted people to remember that if Linus Torvalds did the kernel, GNU built the ecosystem it resides in.
I heard him in person saying this in a speech over 10 years ago.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
I never heard RMS talk about GNU/Minix; I did about GNU/Linux
Re: (Score:2)
Just because RMS makes up the notion that Linux is somehow part of the GNU project doesn't make it so.
Let's try a car analogy.... I might manufacture almost all of the parts for an an automobile body, but when somebody else puts those pieces together into a single car, the car is still branded with *their* name... not mine.
Redhat Linux, Slackware Linux, Debian Linux, Gentoo Linux, Ubuntu Linux.... these are all reasonable. GNU, however... does not construct their own distribution of Linux, so GNU/Linu
Re: (Score:2)
RMS is incorrect. It is no more important for Linux than it is for Minix, which was also built with gcc.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Are you sure that after you read the facts - you come to that conclusion? I suppose if you have a Freightliner brand semi truck, and a Acme123 Diesel Engine product as the engine - you say you have a Acme123 truck?
You also know you can run Debian(and friends) on a Linux kernel, FreeBSD kernel, or Hurd kernel - with the same user land tools? That's because of GNU! Any of those kernels on their own would be crippled without the incredible suite of userland tools GNU provides. The idea that you don't want to g
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Name me some quality Apache products (Score:5, Informative)
Solr, hadoop, activemq?
Seriously.
Re: (Score:1)
Hadoop was based on Google code. Solr was based on CNET's code. I can't really think of much that has come out of the Apache Foundation that is 100% homegrown open source and has a steady, active, mature development cycle. Instead it's all fluff and it just feels like to me that unless you're one of the top 20 Open Source software projects out there, that nothing new is coming across.
Anyone else wonder if this has something to do with App Markets and the ease of which one can make money?
Re: (Score:2)
Anyone else wonder if this has something to do with App Markets and the ease of which one can make money?
I'm not sure it can all be blamed on app markets, but in part that could have an effect. In that scenario, given that the code is free the ability to make money is really based on marketing. People will pay a couple of dollars to save them the hassle of pulling down the source, building it on their PC and then uploading that to their phones but anybody can do that and in the end the best marketer will win out. Of course then there is also the person who is happy to publish the binary for free (no cost) whic
Re: (Score:2)
Of all of the complaints which could be levelled at the Apache Foundation, this one has to be the least relevant. One of the roles that TAF plays is as a place where you can send your code (as long as it's useful and falls under their purview) to ensure that it's looked after.
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: (Score:3)
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.
Subversion was originally tigris.org. Geronimo and Derby were IBM products (all donated). Also log4j.
Apache has developed or adopted more products than I can count. OpenJPA, Apache Commons, Axis, CXF, Velocity, Struts. The list goes on and on.
Re: (Score:2)
Subversion was originally tigris.org. Geronimo and Derby were IBM products (all donated). Also log4j.
Apache has developed or adopted more products than I can count. OpenJPA, Apache Commons, Axis, CXF, Velocity, Struts. The list goes on and on.
That's part of what they do — provide umbrella support for projects with things like hosting, governance, legal and stuff like that. They're clear indicators of success, of impact. Coding isn't the only thing that a project needs. (FWIW, CXF has definitely been developed quite a bit since adoption.)
Re: Name me some quality Apache products (Score:1)
Tomcat slow, unreliable and fat? Runs in 12MiB heap, competes in performance with httpd and has never, ever crashed in the 32 server-years we have had it running in production. If you werent able to get it to work, it was probably your buggy application.
Re: (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: (Score:3)
OpenOffice is a good alternative, but by no means best in class. Maybe it is the only serious solution on Linux and that is a different thing. Best in class in that area is still Microsoft Office by a long shot, hell and even Corel WordPerfect Office, since it has some really cool PDF editing tools in the word processor itself.
But other than that, I think Apache is doing great, even if I never was a Java fan. They have very interesting projects like Nutch/Solr, Traffic Server and by being the main bastion o
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I guess I feel the same way.
Of the projects that folks have mentioned, there are a few that I would have considered using at one time, but none that I would choose to use, today.
All in all, it has seemed like Apache is where projects go to die for a long time, now.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Yea IIS just tends to work better (Score:1)
And updating/patching it is easier.
hmmm (Score:3, Funny)
Apache Software Foundation... hmmm. let me think ... you mean the Java Yank Circle?
Apache and OpenOffice (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never understood why they were so keen on helping Oracle thumb their nose at LibreOffice the rest of the FOSS community. My opinion of them took a nosedive when they did that, as I'm sure did many others'. What was the point, exactly?
Re: (Score:2)
I find this far more likely than any of the other explanations.
"Because they're mature enough to help Oracle act like a spoiled brat" doesn't really hold a lot of water, honestly.
Re: (Score:2)
I've never understood why they were so keen on helping Oracle thumb their nose at LibreOffice the rest of the FOSS community. My opinion of them took a nosedive when they did that, as I'm sure did many others'. What was the point, exactly?
Er... You *do* know it was the LibreOffice folks who left the OO community to start a new fork, don't you? The motivation for the fork was that they considered Oracle untrustworthy. I happen to agree, but I don't see that Oracle acted maliciously in its short stewardship of OO. People who expected Oracle to contribute support to an "Oracle is Untrustworthy" OO fork weren't being realistic. Oracle was not obligated to support LIbreOffice, any more than you'd expect Red Hat to support CentOS. And under the
Re: (Score:1)
Openoffice needed a home away from Oracle, and the Apache Software Foundation is big enough to host it. Being removed from Oracle, OpenOffice was able to become a combination of Sun StarOffice and IBM Lotus Symphony. At this point in time, LibreOffice and AOO have different licenses - LO is GPL, and AOO is AL.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm glad that Apache took over from Oracle. Why should the only active development be GPL licensed?
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting you should put it that way. Would you call Oracle's handling of the whole thing "mature"?
Re: (Score:2)
We're talking about what Apache did in relation to Oracle and OpenOffice/LibreOffice, which makes Oracle's actions very relevant.
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."
Betteridge's Law (Score:2)
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."
If it can be "Yes" too. Andrew C. Oliver clearly thinks so "I have a lot of respect for many of the people on the Apache board, but it's probably time for new leadership and a new perspective on what makes a successful project -- and when it should really, truly be allowed out of incubation and how to ensure private interests don't cloud judgement regarding that". The reality is the answer is more complex than that.
I understand Betteridge's law of headlines...I am simply tired of it being misunderstood.
Re: (Score:2)
If the answer were clearly no, there would be no reason to phrase it as a question. In any case, which is more likely? That one guy is dissatisfied with the direction the foundation has been going, or that everyone else involved (a group that includes a whole lot of very smart people) has honestly gotten "lost" (whatever that means)?
In fact, the only thing that's actually clear is that (at least) one developer has expressed dissatisfaction with the direction the project has been going in recently. So, would
Let's see how well a project does when it's sued (Score:1)
Apache is more than just a place to host your code, it provides a lot of other infrastructure, including legal protection. I bet half the projects on GitHub would be dead with the threat of a lawsuit.
Re: (Score:2)
It is worth to recognize that the licensing provided by Apache is different from the licensing provided by GPL, and that both have their merits and disadvantages.
As long as the organizations of Apache and GNU are aware that their existence depends on the license models they have both will continue to exist along with fully commercial licenses. There are of course a myriad of sub variants of licenses too of all of them.
When it comes to lawsuits - the only winners there are the lawyers. Everyone else will los
Leadership in Virtual Communities (Score:1)
Virtual communities like open source software groups or other virtual organizations have an inherent problem with leadership. The main reason is that it's not so easy for somebody to lead unless others see him talk in person. Charismatic leaders build consensus by convincing others partly because they present strong arguments, but also because people like to watch them talk as they are effective public speakers and often of above average looks.
In a virtual community most of that body language, charisma and
Apache httpd (Score:2)
Where's the progress on Apache's httpd server? It's still mostly configured from a monolithic, messy text file with .htaccess files sometimes strewn around random directories. There is no web-based configuration even though it's a *web server*. There's no other GUI configuration, and building one to work with Apache's text file is very hard at best.
I've now switched to Cherokee [cherokee-project.com] and I'm not looking back. I'm not sure what happened to progress with Apache.
Re: (Score:1)
What could possibly go wrong.
Re: (Score:2)
A web server should not have a web server required for configuring said web server. What type of circular logic are you playing with?
On that note, what web server *does* have what you are describing?
Re: (Score:2)
Cherokee.
No. (Score:2)
Serdar Yegalulp (Score:2)
I'd give the article more credence if the author wasn't using a pseudonym.
open office old news (Score:2)
This was my comment back in 2002 about Star/Open Office
http://www.computerworld.com/news/2002/story/0,11280,73896,00.html [computerworld.com]
Re: (Score:1)
So much of the code there is utter, utter crap. I mean, it's now getting to the point where somebody tosses in some highly experimental code they wrote, with no comments, no supporting documentation, and usually a ton of bugs, yet it's considered a "project".
Its convenient hosting, if youre not interested in being secretive about what youre doing then whacking code snippets (which is often what they are, many dont have any license at all) on public github is an easy way to access them from wherever and to share with people. It doesnt have to be production-level, shipping code, it can be a script you wrote for a very specific case that fails in all others, so what?