Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community • Hacker News Board

Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#231

Post by kazinator » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 2:32 AM UTC

TallGuyShort wrote: post #43

dijit wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does it matter that GitHub themselves is not open source? It matters a lot actually; a lot of free-software/open source software are licensed that way because the projects themselves are ideologically predisposed. While that does not hold true for certain (even large) projects like Linux, it certainly holds true for Apache (historically) and GNU. To put it another way; if you found out GNU coreutils were hosted on…

I think the ASF, being non-copyleft, is much less ideological than you're thinking. They're big on having rules to foster healthy community and community based decisions, but the license is really just a laissez faire BSD-ish license with some particular edge cases addressed. It's open-source but flexible and friendly to businesses with hybrid models. Something like GitHub that promotes input from people involved wit…

Let me tell you, as a little data point, I use BSD licenses and I'm ideological enough not to want to host anything on a walled-garden now run by Microsoft.

Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#232

Post by stephenr » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 2:45 AM UTC

ShaneCurcuru wrote: post #209

Important clarifications: - The announcement is only about technology, there's no "partnership" between the ASF and GitHub. The ASF is vendor-neutral about all of it's operations. In particular, there is an expectation that Apache project communities continue to do much of their community and release management on ASF servers, not solely on GitHub. - Many Apache projects asked to use GitHub. It took a while, but Apac…

Is the tooling decommissioned because you’re using alternatives or because you’re no longer mirroring repos?

Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#233

Post by rectang » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 3:16 AM UTC

GordonS wrote: post #210

saurik wrote: post #122

Apparently, one of the big motivating reasons for this was "cost". > The foundation’s 2018 five-year strategic plan noted that infrastructure services account for more than 80 percent of the total ASF expense budget, adding: “Increasingly, project communities have infrastructure requirements that strain the capabilities of the ASF.” > The report noted that, given burgeoning costs, encouraging the use of more external…

Holy shit, they're spending $800k a year on infrastructure! Honestly, it's difficult to understand why they haven't sooner moved to GitHub, or even GitLab or the like - it feels reckless. That money could be put to far greater use - as an Apache supporter who hasn't ever felt the need to look at their costs, I have to say that I'm very disappointed.

I encourage you (and everyone else) to look more closely at the ASF budget. As noted above, it's 80% for infrastructure, and that is supporting hundreds of projects. Some of those are simple, some are not at all (Hadoop, Cordova, Spark, OpenOffice, Mesos, CloudStack, etc.).

In fact, many of those projects rely on other resources not included in that 800k: How much does it cost to run a testing farm for all the devices Cordova has to run on? Do you really think 800k is such a crazy number?

The ASF runs lean. It has to, because it is a 501(c)(3) charity and cannot be as responsive to large donors as some might prefer (i.e. giving them more direct control over the foundation in return for more funding.)

Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#234

Post by jraph » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 3:17 AM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #224

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.

Even if it were true, this isn't the "entire point", or at least not to everyone. You're talking about communities that have diverse interests, and only a subset of those people are into avoiding all dependency on commercial software in the FSF or Debian sense. "FOSS" includes Windows developers, Mac developers, iOS developers, Java developers, people working for bigtech corporations, and some bigtech firms themselve…

it seems you confused commercial with non free software. Java may be a commercial product, but it is also free software and the FSF and Debian are happy with that. They do not reject commercial software quite the contrary.

That said, your point still stands.

Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#235

Post by mikekchar » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 5:30 AM UTC

TallGuyShort wrote: post #205

xorcist wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the ASF, being non-copyleft, is much less ideological than you're thinking Do you somehow consider copyleft style licenses "more ideological" than those which are not? That is probably more telling about your own views on licensing than it is on ideologies. FreeBSD is not copyleft, and they work actively on eliminating GPL from their base. Debian mostly under the free software umbrella, but welcomes BSD code in the…

Sure there are counterexamples, but I certainly don't hesitate to say copyleft does tend to be more ideological. In every instance I can think of, every serious discussion I've had with a company about project licensing that ended with anything other than the GPL, the concerns are virality, even when they like open-source (which is a practical concern overriding an ideological one), and a lack of any real interest in…

There is a very practical reason for choosing a copyleft license as an author. If you choose a non-copyleft free software license, then downstream users actually have more options than you do. They can take your code, add small modifications and then release the result under a non-free license. Even if you implement those features as well, you aren't playing on a level playing field. You have to support all of the software and they only have to support their small additions. The end result is that they can offer a product with a value-add at a lower cost than you can. You are essentially competing with yourself.

Of course you can decide not to release your code under a free software license, but that rather defeats the purpose of running a free software project ;-)

Looking at it another way, more permissive licences grant more options to downstream users than copyleft licenses. It doesn't make sense to argue that you are offering only copyleft licenses to benefit those downstream users individually (and I know of nobody who makes that claim). Instead, the argument is that it is better for the group that everybody has equal restrictions and can't use proprietary code to gain an advantage over everyone else.

This is actually one of the reasons why if anyone asks me to assign copyright for my side projects over for work, I'm happy to do so: on the provision that all of my work is licensed under the GPL. It barely matters to me at that point who owns the copyright (though to protect yourself further you should ensure that no one person has copyright over the entire work).

IMHO, although the choice to write free software at all is often ideological, the choice of using a copyleft license or not is usually pragmatic -- at least among those who understand why copyleft licenses are written the way they are.

Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#236

Post by lars_francke » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 5:54 AM UTC

zaat wrote: post #211

lars_francke wrote: post #180

I believe the ASF blog[1] to have a much better title: "The Apache® Software Foundation Expands Infrastructure with GitHub Integration" "joins" sounds very wrong to me. Apache has had a Github account for years and the mirrors have existed for years as well. The ASF still hosts their own Git repositories at https://gitbox.apache.org/ In fact all ASF projects needed to migrate from the old git-wip to gitbox just recen…

According to the announcement: >In February 2019, the migration to GitHub was complete, and the ASF's own git service was decommissioned. P.S - the links you provided are not formatted correctly, and leads to 404 pages due to trailing '>'

Sorry for the broken links.

Yes, you are correct, that's what it says in the announcement but that is not correct. The "old" ASF git stuff was decommissioned, yes. It's a bit misleading.

A more detailed explanation has been put up here: https://blogs.apache.org/infra/entry/apache-and-github-a-fri...

Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#237

Post by lucb1e » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 6:01 AM UTC

CraftThatBlock wrote: post #227

lucb1e wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use Jira in a very small company and I avoid it when possible. Wrote a command line hours tracker, that saves 1/3rd of my usage. Maybe I'll write an issues CRUD application some time as well, but I think going further down that rabbit hole costs more time than it saves. My previous employer was a little larger (some 40 employees) and I can say that Jira solves nothing that we couldn't solve much better with text f…

I'm at a company which we have hundreds of Jira users, and for us, it works quite well. It's really about how the team/department uses Jira, how it's setup, and the overall process. My last company we were ~30, and it was a total mess (although we were only ~3 developers). It's really about how it's setup.

What is the difference that makes it work for you now where it didn't before?

Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#238

Post by kfogel » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 7:44 AM UTC

paroneayea wrote: post #74

jordigh wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hi jordigh! (Historically) lead developer and co-founder of MediaGoblin here (and ActivityPub spec co-author/editor, so I have more than a bit of insight/bias I think). You're not wrong. And neither is the parent post! MediaGoblin is in "unofficial retirement", but that's because we made progress unexpectedly in other ways, which is good , but not where we realized we were going. Allow me to lay out what happened and…

What @anderspitman said -- would be great if this were a post on your blog.

Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#239

Post by int_19h » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 8:13 AM UTC

craigsmansion wrote: post #110

jlokier wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 li…

"Ideological and eventual practical problems too" is way too general. The very specific flash-point was Linus throwing an unjustified hissy-fit defending Larry McVoy of BitKeeper being difficult about Andrew Tridgel (Tridge of Samba fame) "reverse engineering" the data traffic of Bitkeeper for inter-operability (really just sniffing client packets with wireshark or something). Whether the name "git" pertains to Tridg…

So the real problem was really the proprietary nature of the protocol - both in the sense that it wasn't properly documented, and in the sense that the author tried to use legal means to keep it secret.

But GitHub doesn't have this problem.

Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#240

Post by int_19h » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 8:18 AM UTC

progval wrote: post #57

ultim8k wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

"Deems necessary, in its discretion ... to protect the integrity and stability of the registry" sounds extremely vague, though.