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Apache considered harmful

mikealrogers.com

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Re: Apache considered harmful

#2

Post by davidw »

Some good points, but github doesn't take the place of a community. When it's working well, it helps, but when there is a breakdown of collaboration and communication, you get one of those codebases that has been forked 1298 times where none of the people doing the forking is sharing anything. That's a community fail, not a version control system issue.

I do think that it'd be nice if the ASF offered git alongside svn, and concentrated on the community aspect of things, which it does tend to do fairly well.

Re: Apache considered harmful

#5

Post by nknight »

Much of this is pretty unsurprising, especially for people like me who watched the attempted transition of OOo to Apache.

The way the article puts it is that the ASF is trying to solve problems that don't exist anymore, which is true to an extent, but the deeper problem is that the ASF has a particular view of how open source development and project management work, and attempts to impose that view on far too diverse a community, even as it tries to absorb more and more communities.

The ASF is simultaneously trying to be "big tent" and unified, and the balance is all out of whack. It's easy to draw parallels to recent political problems in the US and EU. In all three cases, there's going to have to be some transformations, probably in both society/community and structure, to come back to a place where the institution contributes to the greater good, instead of being a source of unending tension and meta-arguments.

Re: Apache considered harmful

#6

Post by jzawodn »

nknight wrote: post #5

Much of this is pretty unsurprising, especially for people like me who watched the attempted transition of OOo to Apache. The way the article puts it is that the ASF is trying to solve problems that don't exist anymore, which is true to an extent, but the deeper problem is that the ASF has a particular view of how open source development and project management work, and attempts to impose that view on far too diverse…

Very well said. I was going to write something like that but don't have to. Yay for up votes!

Re: Apache considered harmful

#8

Post by jowiar »

I second this thoroughly. I was was almost driven to start blogging last week by ASF's poor job of maintaining its projects. There was a small bug in Solr. I was not the first to find this bug, and someone had not only reported the bug, but filed a patch on the bug tracker a year and a half ago. The patch was never merged in, nobody provided any feedback as to why the patch wasn't merged in.

One huge plus with Github is that if the official steward of a project would like to hand it off to someone else, or is failing to maintain it, it is trivial for someone else to take over the project.

Re: Apache considered harmful

#9

Post by latchkey »

davidw wrote: post #2

Some good points, but github doesn't take the place of a community. When it's working well, it helps, but when there is a breakdown of collaboration and communication, you get one of those codebases that has been forked 1298 times where none of the people doing the forking is sharing anything. That's a community fail, not a version control system issue. I do think that it'd be nice if the ASF offered git alongside sv…

Just because you can't 'see' the fork with subversion doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I'm sure plenty of ASF projects are 'forked' within companies and the code is never shared.

What I've been advocating for a while now on the members@apache list is that the ASF look at using Github (either they host it or the ASF does) as the basis to build a new type of community that the ASF has never experienced before. Something that isn't tied to the old school.

Re: Apache considered harmful

#10

Post by jaaron »

jowiar wrote: post #8

I second this thoroughly. I was was almost driven to start blogging last week by ASF's poor job of maintaining its projects. There was a small bug in Solr. I was not the first to find this bug, and someone had not only reported the bug, but filed a patch on the bug tracker a year and a half ago. The patch was never merged in, nobody provided any feedback as to why the patch wasn't merged in. One huge plus with Github…

Then fork it. It's open source for a reason. Or raise a fuss on the mailing list. That's how open source works.
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