I always thought Im just not good enough to understand, hey Im just too dumb, surely there's people out there who understand what differentiates all these apache products! Nope never found one.
A huge chunk of Apache is Java libraries.
Some projects are just academia doing academia things; they graduate, the original people move on, and the project dies. Others are corporate donations, including the occasional “we don’t want to play with this anymore; maybe Apache can keep it alive” project.
That being said, the incubator graduation rate is still roughly 75–80%.
How useful or alive those graduates are five or ten years later is a different question.
Saying Apache is where software go to die is just wrong.
...and yet you proceeded to list all the ways that dead projects are being kept undead by Apache? I'm getting conflicting vibes here from your post.
No conflicting vibes: 80% of projects survive the incubation, become TLP, and live a long life. How is that a hospice?
I only listed one way the undead project kept undead - "nobody has checked the pulse and filled out the paperwork yet." That was about _some_ of the 25 projects out of 400 projects. As for academia projects - some of them survive.
There is only one category that has a high mortality rate in Apache: government-donated projects.