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Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

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Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#51

Post by nimbius »

atonse wrote: post #9

I found this title very confusing. I thought it was the equivalent of their non-profit being absorbed by GitHub. Meaning, the corporate structure." Why don't they just say that Apache will officially host their repositories on GitHub moving forward?

Because the writer, Bryan Clark, is Director of Product for OSS Maintainers and is trying to contextualize the move to feature the company he works for, not the code thats been around for far longer.

"apache moves to github" makes it sound like apache made a rote and boring switch, which this sort of is. They just as easily could have moved to sourceforge or gitlab. joining a team has implications that github (c) works together with open source. while it certainly hosts a lot of it, github isnt open source.

Headlining this as your "open source community" also helps avoid the uncomfortable issue of an open source product moving to a completely proprietary system for CI and development.

Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#52

Post by pas »

rocqua wrote: post #42
meddlepal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of hard line FOSS folks is really quite small. Personally I would be hard pressed to bother contributing to a project not on GitHub at this point. There is a certain workflow and interaction model that GitHub projects use that non-GitHub ones do not and it is simply not worth the time investment to learn those other projects. Not only that but it allows me to easily point at my work and go "I did that" whe…

What about a gitlab based project?

I guess gitlab is the same. The important flow is that there's a very easy way to fork and send a pull/merge request.

Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#53

Post by ultim8k »

wDcBKgt66V8WDs wrote: post #41
im3w1l wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They give up their autonomy in moderation - Github will now have the power to say "you are not allowed to contribute to Apache projects". This will lead to a) Github will have leverage over the project. b) They make themselves vulnerable to the outrage du jour. If an outrage mob forms against someone in the Apache Project, Github may kick them off their platform - they are known to have done so in the past. Apache wi…

To all you who think this idea is unfounded or dramatic, remember that this is the entire point of FOSS. Whether this idea holds water is irrelevant, it's aligned to FOSS and it's strange that they don't appear to care or have valued other things over it.

Hmm based on this, the .org tld and the server providers can have control over the project too. Right? If so, we should use an open source distributed protocol.

Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#55

Post by coldpie »

jordigh wrote: post #40
ebg13 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do they think that they’ll get enough new contributors this way to offset the (more than slight) irony? Absolutely yes. In another thread, someone mentioned that MediaGoblin is basically dead now. I went to look at their repo and it's hosted on Savannah. That definitely hurts involvement.

I'm kind of cynical about this sort of thing and I don't think the hosting really changes the quality of contributions. The amount, maybe, but you get a lot of crappy drive-bys that are about one particular but very enthusiastic person's pet peeves, which probably don't affect the wider userbase. The drive-bys require a lot of work to integrate for relatively little profit. Mediagoblin is dying not so much because it…

> I'm kind of cynical about this sort of thing and I don't think the hosting really changes the quality of contributions.

Yeah. We've had this topic come up a number of times in the Wine project. We still use a mailing list and git-am patches for our contributions. We have a few hard-liner FOSS types who would strongly reject a GitHub solution (including myself), but a self-hosted Gitlab solution may be accepted. But in the end there just isn't much evidence that the change would be beneficial for the project. If you can't be bothered to figure out how to send an email or attach a patch to the bug tracker, are you really going to usefully contribute to Wine? It's an active topic of debate, but just being "easier to contribute" isn't clearly a good thing.

Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#56

Post by idoubtit »

Macha wrote: post #29
idoubtit wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose it is because of the feud between OpenOffice (Apache) and LibreOffice (Document Foundation). For years, OpenOffice has been Apache's most downloaded project[1]. But it is only because of the past glory of this name when Sun promoted it, and by confusion with LibreOffice. When Apache was given OpenOffice by Oracle, they let the code rot, with just a few dozens commits a year. IIRC, their strict access polici…

I'm pretty sure Tomcat and the Apache HTTPd get more downloads than that, it's just harder to measure as they usually come from package repositories for various Linux distros or homebrew.

When Apache published OpenOffice 4.0, there were about a million download per week, for a total of 85M downloads in 2.5 years[1].

Fortunately, that is no more the case. OpenOffice is in maintenance mode (last minor features were 5 years ago). So, even if the project seems alive at first glance, its user base is thinning out.

[1]: https://blogs.apache.org/OOo/entry/apache_openoffice_in_2013...

Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#57

Post by progval »

ultim8k wrote: post #53
wDcBKgt66V8WDs wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To all you who think this idea is unfounded or dramatic, remember that this is the entire point of FOSS. Whether this idea holds water is irrelevant, it's aligned to FOSS and it's strange that they don't appear to care or have valued other things over it.

Hmm based on this, the .org tld and the server providers can have control over the project too. Right? If so, we should use an open source distributed protocol.

For what it's worth, the conditions for termination from the Public Interest Registry (.org's registry) are slightly better than Github. PIR has a five-items list of possible reasons: https://pir.org/policies/org-idn-policies/takedown-policy/ while "GitHub reserves the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time."

Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#58

Post by jlokier »

atonse wrote: post #10
snazz wrote: post #8

It confuses me why so many traditionally pro-FOSS projects move to a not-free-nor-open tool like GitHub. Do they think that they’ll get enough new contributors this way to offset the (more than slight) irony?

Better participation. A lot more people know how to use GitHub's tools. It'll likely increase the amount of development, participation, pull requests, etc that ASF projects get. Does it matter that GitHub themselves is not open source?

> Does it matter that GitHub themselves is not open source?

That's for Apache to decide, but consider:

Git itself was written, by Linus Torvalds, because Linux (the kernel) was using non-open source version control at the time called BitKeeper, and the non-open source nature of it was causing increasing problems in the Linux developer community, both ideological and eventually practical problems too, caused by the licensing preventing some devs from building tools.

When Git was written and the Linux kernel devs jumped to it en masse, it was like a breath of fresh air.

BitKeeper has credit for many of the ideas found in Git before Git. (Aside: credit also should go to Mercurial for ideas). One of the things that made Git better than BitKeeper was people were free to build more tools on it, which is entirely due to the open vs. closed source licensing, as well as a general attitude of welcome vs. unwelcome towards those tools.

GitHub is different because it already builds on Git, and works with tools that anyone can build on top of Git.

But some things which are really essential to thriving developer community are locked away in GitHub, so it's still limiting what people can build with it. (For example, can you innovate on how Issues are handled? Somewhat, but not in every way that is useful.)

In some ways GitHub is like any other walled garden. You can't fork it yourself.

Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#59

Post by bredren »

protomyth wrote: post #25
joking wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why is that?

The various Apache tribes.

I had not thought about the naming of Apache the software despite it describing so many "Native American people inhabiting the southwest United States and northern Mexico." I also realize now the use of a feather as the logo.

Previous HN discussion on the Apache software relationship with the Apache people:

Apache Rewrites History: Why is it Named “Apache”? [2013]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5536134

Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#60

Post by briandear »

snazz wrote: post #8

It confuses me why so many traditionally pro-FOSS projects move to a not-free-nor-open tool like GitHub. Do they think that they’ll get enough new contributors this way to offset the (more than slight) irony?

If a non-profit buys food from a for-profit grocery store, is that ironic? Just because a project is open source doesn’t imply any requirement that all of the products and services used for that project must be.
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