The mark of a good open source maintainer is the ability to, when your personal interest wanes, find a new maintainer and hand over.

I've done this several times, and certainly development went on much slower than before, but them's the breaks. At least I did the right thing.

For such a big organization, with so many open source projects under its big wing, Apache has failed on this mark of maintainership completely. It failed so badly that at this stage, deploying Apache-maintained software for a customer or employer is downright irresponsible.

Would you organize all your company's internal communications around Google's latest messaging thing? That's insane, you know it'll bite you in the ass in a few years time when it gets cancelled. Apache is no better.