| "How does this help Apache or its projects?" The Apache Foundation is what you make of it. It will not change just because you post to your blog, but it will change if you engage the committer and membership population, build a consensus around your ideas and volunteer to do the actual work to make the changes happen. No one will force you to do such work and if you don't want to do it, then you're not obligated to do so. No one will be upset if you, I or anyone else leaves the Foundation. It's cool. We're all here at-will, volunteering effort and code. Apache cannot be everything to everyone, despite how much it is pulled to be so. Right now it fills a particular important role in the open source and larger software ecosystems. It's in that position due to both historical precedent as well as intentional decisions by the membership body. But trust me, no one in Apache is ever, ever completely satisfied with the Foundation. That's to be expected -- the organization is driven by the compromises of a large group of people with different ideas and expectations. To balance between the chaos of constant change and the death of no change, the organization has grown guidelines and rules from the collected wisdom of its membership. This gives us at least some framework by which to evolve. As for hosting code, there have been proposals at time for Apache to push the code hosting to some other organization. Once it was SourceForge, then Google Code, now Github. Of course, it's a tricky situation as the Foundation has particular requirements and wants to know its code will be around for decades. Moreover, infra team is constantly understaffed and thus are a very, very conservative bunch. We've seen way too many people jump in with a great idea and then leave maintenance to someone else. They're stubborn for a reason. And perhaps Apache and Github are incompatible. So what? Github is a tool. It's incompatible with lots and lots of organizations and ways of doing things. The FSF has its rules and culture. Same with the Linux kernel, distros and desktops like KDE and Gnome. Android is different too. Not all of those mesh with Github and that's fine. |
This is true only from a CYA standpoint. As Mikeal said in the article, it's possible to do a lot of work and build up a strong case for a change that's important to project maintainers, yet still have Apache come up with excuses for why it can't happen. This is what happened with git -- twice.