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Comment by datalopers | Hacker News Reader

Apache has a few good projects and so much abandonware it’s very difficult to know which to avoid entirely.

At this point I think Apache has about 15 different data streaming/queueing/event processing systems.

That's a consequence of the ASF largely serving as a way to dump software that isn't commercially viable (or wasn't to begin with). The idea being that a community can form around it, consisting of former users and developers. Taking software to the ASF is accompanied by a grant to the ASF, and I think it's a decent way to stop developing a product, or is at least miles better than a torched earth approach and stop sales, support, development immediately, firing developers, etc. Not everything will live on ofc, but at least one can try.

Is ASF the CA of Free Software?

Softbank

Do you mean certificate authority or California? I can see an argument for both.

Probably Computer Associates. Speaking of soulcrushing software graveyards, there's also OpenText (though it is less well known).

> Probably Computer Associates. Speaking of soulcrushing software graveyards,

The Google of Free Software then.

“OpenText”

(gets PTSD shivers thinking about LiveLink)

TIL.

Oh, and that was Tim Bray.

Bingo.

CA is where software goes to die.

Yeah you're so right, everybody stop using this Kafka abandonware! Nothing to see here...

I often feel like projects that are handed over to Apache are basically put in the equivalent of an aircraft boneyard; stashed for archival purposes, but it will no longer receive much development effort.

Seems to be the pattern. Whenever something gets the "Apache" prefix I get nervous that it's abandoned.

Giving Apache ownership of something is always a signal that whoever was maintaining it before, doesn't want to maintain it anymore. Whether or not that thing dies depends entirely on who ends up running the project post transition to apache.

Funnily, there have been a few cases of projects that have seen a breath of new life by moving over to apache. Netbeans and Groovy seem to be standouts there.

> Netbeans and Groovy

I used that ten years ago

I though they were dead by now

Around the time they transitioned to Apache, they were pretty close to dead. After the transition they've both notably picked up dev work.

Kafka and CouchDB are both actively developed

Cassandra and most of the Hadoop zoo too, but that's mostly because of a few vendors. (Eg. DataStax for Cassandra, and Cloudera & Hortonworks for Hadoop. Plus probably a bunch of smaller ones.)

Companies handing their failed projects over definitely seems to be a pattern.

On the other hand the ASF has a few very active and healthy projects under its umbrella, sometimes being among if not the go to solution inside a specific problem space.

Come again? Lucene, Solr, Kafka, Zookeeper, httpd, CouchDB, .. and that's just the top of my head.

It's a misconception of what Apache is. It's legal umbrella for open source projects, not an organization with a goal of actually developing projects.

Good point, and fair.

Apache presumably has criteria for accepting an open source project? Although all I can find is this, marked "draft": https://www.apache.org/dev/project-requirements

But I'd suggest they need some, and also minimum requirements for remaining an Apache project, which if not met, the project will be either removed, or perhaps just clearly marked archived/unmaintained/historical on apache pages. (a status from which perhaps there is a way to escape with renewed attention as well).

I think Apache Attic is exactly this.

https://attic.apache.org/

In the case of OpenOffice, they've repeatedly gamed efforts to close them down by doing bad-faith "releases" to pretend that they've got activity.

ASF governance is weak, and that's why it might as well be the Abandonware Software Foundation.

The practical answer is that you go and look at a project's release history at its primary repo. I don't know of a good way to browse all apache projects by livelihood though. The closest thing I know of to keep track of Apache projects overall is this:

https://lists.apache.org/list.html?announce@apache.org

But just eyeballing that really quick I can see it's not authoritative, because a new version of Apache Spark just came out and isn't announced there.

https://spark.apache.org/news/index.html

There is also this, but it's very cluttered with submodules, but it does appear more authoritative.

https://projects.apache.org/releases.html

What are those some of the good Apache projects?

Practically never used anything but httpd (which I no longer use) and everything else looked like bloated software being Java taking huge resource and usually has a better competitor.

I occasionally see Kafka being used as parts of software stack but not sure if that is the best choice with huge resource use.

Their Java libraries and utils are good: Maven, Utils, Commons, CommonsIO

They have Google Wave -> Apache Wave

At a minimum, and they all have so many bugs :(

I've learned over the last decade or so just to avoid Apache software. It seems like the vast majority of their software is poorly written, enterprise abandonware. They are a joke of their former self. Kind of sad really.

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