So now that I picked Metabase, Superset is topping HN for no apparent reason. Why?
So now that I picked Metabase, Superset is topping HN for no apparent reason. Why?
Business users loved the self-serve query builder, and it wasn't uncommon to walk around the office and see Metabase up on someones screen. My CEO absolutely loved it, and used it daily including to put together data for board decks.
None of my users cared about visualizations, and lived in tabular data. This included finance, marketing, merchandising, operations, and executives (CEO/COO/CFO). The only people that lamented the limited visualization were analysts. Power users did all their day-to-day work in Excel or other tools anyway, such as managing marketing spend or inventory allocations.
Metabase was great for dashboards and self-service (ad-hoc). 10/10 would deploy again.
I don't think it's semi-abandoned. I had a brief interaction with the project in my previous job, and I found the community and the company to be reasonably engaged and responsive.
Hmm. I suppose all open source looks that way if it doesn't get regular funding/attention.
Apache does house a lot of abandonware. They had some relevance as recently as 6-7 years ago but they've been largely replaced by nginx I think. That being said, I view them like the local soup-kitchen - important to have and maintain, but not where I want to go for a 5-star meal.
These projects don't give the apache foundation an appearance of importance or relevance, rather they make it look rather rundown.
Obivously the main "alternative" is for the original company to simply shut down the product/service, which can do irreperable harm to a company when they have high-profile customers who are utterly dependent on a service.
Another alternative is to use an open-source foundation that's directly managed by the original company, which is what Microsoft did with its DotNet Foundation ( https://dotnetfoundation.org/ ) - and while Microsoft's legal team ensures the foundation is "legally" independent, in practice we know all the significant shots are being called from within Microsoft-proper; but it does give us some modest reassurances that .NET won't suddenly return to being closed-source overnight.
Another alternative is to not open-source it and to instead sell it off to another company that can maintain it while still being profitable - this is what Adobe did with Flash: they sold it all off to Samsung because their Harman division wanted to continue using Flash for embedded/automotive UX work. This approach can work, but doesn't benefit the wider ecosystem the way that open-sourcing does - and something something shareholder value and return-on-investment by selling rather than writing-it-off...
What companies won't do is let any of their engs that are passionate about a project split-off from the company to run and maintain it, le sigh.
I think the HN algo is pretty easily manipulated. I worked at a startup that had an effective process to get things to the front page
That sounds (potentially) sleazy. If you think it's a technique that HN could potentially defend against, I encourage you to explain it to hn@ycombinator.com.
Pretty sure it's as simple as posting in your general slack channel "@here we posted a new article to HN, go upvote and write a comment"
Amen brother.
Can you name a few examples?
OpenOffice is probably the most famous (it still has the name, but it is dead, LibreOffice is the real "active" fork).
And the things in the "Attic" are officially dead - https://projects.apache.org/committee.html?attic and many more projects should be there.
Lots of other projects just die silently and/or you are unsure of the status.
Here you at least have a chance to revive them if you like as there is always an overarching organisation.
More things should move into the Attic, like OpenOffice.
https://projects.apache.org/projects.html?name
These are all projects that once were (more) relevant, however seem to have become rather niche (Gradle, Jetbrains/VSCode, GoogleDocs/Libreoffice e.g. for the first three are the dominant competitors).
Most of these projects (like the massive commons listings) are either used by some Java library somewhere (meaning their success/relevance is tied to the usage of Java), or are obscure enough that they are no longer used widely and so suffer from lack of interest.
There are gems in this list, to be sure, but if you just run into half-maintained projects all the time you're not likely to associate good things with the Apache name?