On Tue, Aug 27, 2013 at 5:29 AM, Andre Fischer <awf....@gmail.com> wrote: > For your information, > > There is an article on slashdot [1] "Has the Apache Software Foundation Lost > Its Way?" but most comments are about AOO/LO. >
Didn't we read essentially the same article last year, and the year before? If I wanted to I could nitpick about an article that complains about trademarks and still can't the name of our product right. But I think the greater flaw it makes zero attempt to look at github projects to see whether they are doing any better. Any open source project above a very small size needs to address some basic questions: 1) Who is permitted to change the code? 2) What is the license for the code? 3) How do we decide the code ready to release? 4) How do we resolve technical disagreements? 5) How do we fund and maintain the technical infrastructure for the project? All GitHub covers is #5, mainly that projects are dependent on the generosity of a single for-profit corporation. Everything else is determined on a per project basis, and can vary from dictatorships to chaos. There is absolutely nothing at Github that addresses the issues raised in the article, from bureaucracy, to dependency on a single company, to release schedule, etc. So it is fatuous to compare Apache -- a foundation where these questions have well-understood and accepted answers -- to an amorphous code dump site. The other fatal flaw in the article is that it fails to recognize that when looking at Apache one is looking at 14 years as a foundation, and many more years for some of its projects. So there is a wide range of maturities of projects and their underlying technologies. Many are mature, very mature. Some are newer. But they are not all at the same place in the hype curve. This is not a flaw of Apache that we have mature projects. This is a good thing. Projects like Xerces, Xalan, Ant, Maven, etc., are critical for Java developers, for example. Even POI is important. But when you look at GitHib you see exclusively younger projects, since the site itself is so much younger. But one day they will (if they are fortunate enough to survive) also have old projects, projects making less exciting releases or none at all. And then that will not indicate that Githib is past its prime. It will just indicate that it has survived long enough to have projects at all stages of its life cycle. -Rob > -Andre > > [1] > http://apache.slashdot.org/story/13/08/26/210200/has-the-apache-software-foundation-lost-its-way > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org
