I've felt for a long time (maybe even a decade) that Apache is the place OSS goes to retire/die. It is heartbreaking in some ways, they became the stewards for a lot of interesting projects [1]. And the venerable web server was so important to the early web. I am still running Apache vhosts on a few personal websites.
It is also a totally unfair characterization. I mean, they still house relevant projects including Kafka, Lucene, Zookeeper, Spark, Arrow and many others.
But it does feel Apache lives in a kind of stasis, a relic of the "old" web, like geocities sites or MySpace. If a project ends up in Apache it feels to me like it has gone out to pasture.
It seems that “younger generation” programmers underestimate the value of governance in OSS. The recent Terraform kerluffle couldn’t have happened if Terraform was in the ASF, etc.
Agreed... We are seeing dozens of database companies turn their OSS into basically proprietary shared code licenses. And we seem to still pretend its "open source"
Collaboration, across companies, not ownership by one company is the root of open source. To do that you need some kind of governance model. Essentially "ownership" by one company is conducive to quick progress on specific problems, but not collaboration.
To put it another way: many startups today have adopted the "Open Core" business model, and it's really more about marketing than actual open-source.
"Open Core" means they open-source the core of their product portfolio, core which some enterprising people may use to develop applications on, but for others will really need the buy into the rest of the portfolio to get the best use out of.
I can't really fault companies for using this model. Development is expensive, and business models around open-source are hard. I mean, just look at what Red Hat ends up doing to fend off copycats. Getting people to try your product and also rely on it is a tricky proposition.
I don't fault them either. In fact I'm a big fan of many of those companies.
I think the fault is with the consumers. Many companies consume but do not participate in open source. All the incentives are there for companies to become vendors rather than participants (stewards?) of an open source project.
I think we are heading towards a bit of a shift in this regard. With the CRA in Europe and similar legislation in the States it will become more important to have "enterprise" services surrounding open source software. This is for example support, but also vulnerability assessment and similar things.
I may be mistaken here, but I think we will see pure functionality become less important to enterprise customers, which might (maybe not, but one can hope) proper open source business models more viable again.
Debian is not a commercial entity. It's a volunteer organization.
In fact there's been quite a bit of vitriol about Canonical (company behind Ubuntu) profiting (for what that's worth) from all the hard work from Debian volunteers and not sharing as much of that value back to Debian as was felt was deserved.
I've always wondered about that, I feel like ubuntu sometimes doesn't contribute fixes upstream. When I hear 'it works on ubuntu but not on distro X', it makes me wonder why ubuntu devs didnt post the fixes upstream.
* I do realise that different release timings can fudge with the timing, but when fedora is building upstream versions and I hear it, its a bit.. disheartening.
The flipside is that companies don't seem all that interested in this sort of collaboration, though, nor should they be. It doesn't really make sense for a company that believes its edge is its technology to both give up the secret sauce and accept the dillution of that edge that comes from taking code from outside contributors. The modern version of "open source" is a natural evolution of the concept when this is how companies think.
> We are seeing dozens of database companies turn their OSS into basically proprietary shared code licenses. And we seem to still pretend its "open source"
"open source" here is working as intended. the thing is, "open source" is misunderstood by many (most?) individuals.
"open source" was explicitly created by Eric Raymond and others in the late 90ies because the Free Software movement was seen as too extremistic by companies still deeply rooted into the proprietary model.
"open source" is a nice way out, in order to be able to look cool, while not actually playing it cool.
I said it in many posts and i'll say it again: if you're require to give up copyright on your contributions and the license isn't free-software... then it's just a matter of time before a company turns your code into proprietary intellectual property.
people that do not agree are simply delusional (or okay with that).
Well, sort of. Open source was just a different name to describe free software, with the purpose of emphasizing the collaboration benefits this gives the business rather than the freedom it gives users. But this "business source" stuff is a different thing which is not open source at all.
No, not really. The first three criteria of the Open Source Definition [0] are essentially freedoms 1–3 of the Free Software Definition [1] and freedom 0 more or less maps to criteria 5 and 6.
The mainstream FOSS licenses (GPL, BSD, Apache2, etc.) are all included both in the official list of open source licenses [2] and the official list of free software licenses [3], so these licenses are both open source licenses and free software licenses. These lists might have some minor differences, but they share a substantial subset and the definitions broadly speaking define the same thing.
You can't interpret things like these out of context.
OSS as a term was created at a time when free software, as defined by GNU, was effectively becoming the de-facto standard for collaborative efforts on the internet. Yes, MIT and BSD were around (barely, in the BSD case), but the rising star was Linux and Linux (and the software built on it - GTK, gimp, etc) was GPL.
The industry needed a way to get on the action without touching the "communist" GPL, and that's why ESR's definition of "Open Source" was endorsed. Obviously they coopted all the existing bits they were ok with (i.e. all the ones that did not impose any extra burden on companies), that's why the definitions overlap substantially; but they are not the same thing. If they were, there would not have been any need to create a new definition for it.
Out of context? I provided plenty of context if you care to follow the links I posted.
The distinction between copyleft and non-copyleft licenses, e.g. GPL and BSD, is different from the distinction between open source and free software, which is mainly ideological. The GPL is a copyleft license but also an open source license, as you can see on the OSI website.
For maximum context, here is a quote from the board meeting minutes [0] where the OSI approved the Free Software Foundation's copyleft GPL license as an open source license in accordance with the Open Source Definition: "The Open Source Initiative is pleased to announce that, based on broad review and acceptance by both the Board and the community, it has confirmed that GPLv3 and LGPLv3 both conform to the Open Source Definition."
Yes, because OSS was meant to be a superset of projects including Free Software, so that stuff that did not fit the Free Software definition could still be considered ideologically acceptable. Do I really have to draw a diagram...?
Crap like Sun's CDDL and MPL were endorsed by OSI although they were developed explicitly in opposition to the GPL. Yeah, they might be nominally "free", but their aim was fairly nefarious at the time. OSI endorses all sorts of licenses that are free in name only.
OK, so you're saying that Open Source is "not the same thing" as Free Software and there was a "need to create a new definition for it" to include "stuff that did not fit the Free Software definition". You give the CDDL and the MPL as examples of such stuff.
But if you take a look at the Free Software Foundation's list [0] of Free Software licenses, you will see that it lists both the CDDL and the MPL as Free Software according to the Free Software Definition.
So why should a new definition have been needed to allow these licenses when they are already allowed by the old definition? Maybe you could supply some of that context you were talking about?
CDDL and MPL were defined as "free" only after a lengthy debate, and remain incompatible with the GPL - which, at the time, was widely considered the gold standard of free licenses. Without OSI as an ideological cover, they would have been ostracized even harder than they were.
> So why should a new definition have been needed to allow these licenses when they are already allowed by the old definition?
Maybe you should ask the founders of OSI? If their work was fundamentally pointless, why did they do it? Because it wasn't pointless, it was seen as necessary to be able to say "we are Good Guys, but not like them dirty GPL hippies".
> The industry needed a way to get on the action without touching the "communist" GPL, and that's why ESR's definition of "Open Source" was endorsed.
which against, doesn't really makes sense.
Stallman has repeated over and over that the Free Software movement is not about communism (despite what communist people like to say).
Most likely, the industry needed a way to get people to submit improvements and patches (essentially doing Development, QA and support) for free without having to give a way the right to sell proprietary services.
Yes, basically a marketing campaign. Wikipedia [0] says (in part): "Netscape's act prompted Raymond and others to look into how to bring free software principles and benefits to the commercial-software industry. They concluded that FSF's social activism was not appealing to companies like Netscape, and looked for a way to rebrand the free software movement to emphasize the business potential of the sharing of source code."
In other words, we had a thing that would benefit everyone in many ways, but some people didn't like the marketing message of "users deserve these rights!" so a complementary marketing message of "cheaper and higher-quality software through collaboration!" was needed to reach that group.
You are assuming that a strict and stable governance model is good for OSS.
But often it is the least stable projects with lots of hostile forks and huge mailing list arguments which turn out to be the most successful projects.
Strict and stable governance model is perhaps dull and turns away contributors who feel they will never get to the top of such a stable project with long timelines and complex procedures for everything.
"Strict and stable" isn't quite the important feature, its being community-managed. Chaotic projects with lots of forks, and disorganized governance may be a sign that there is a strong community. If the chaos goes on forever, then you're going to probably lose people to the drama (or the forks themselves will eventually stabilize). If the chaos is short, spasmatic, and leads to a better outcome, then it was overall a good thing in the project's governance.
> "Ask bob on discord and he'll give you commit access to the repo"
and:
> "First you need to fill out the CLA and send 3 pull requests before you can then apply for committer access at the bi-monthly steering group committee. Present your case in an email to them at least 28 days beforehand, and make sure an existing committer seconds it"
In the current market you reliably can do both. Nobody in software can deny the importance of open source software, if only for learning or training. Without FOSS, there would only be stagnation.
You can even develop commercial software and still support FOSS. This isn't some think the kids of the 90s do. Most new open source projects are created by younger developers.
> Try to make a living from [...] open source games.
To me, many of the elements of political interest with free software in general don't really come into play with games (although some incidental issues, like privacy concerns, certainly do come into play in practice). Part of what makes software freedom urgent where it matters most is a very material dependency on software— it matters most when we depend on that software to make our livings, or to access medical care, or to access education. The stakes are lower for games, and I imagine that many people who care deeply about free software are still comfortable buying and running proprietary games. I know I am.
I don't think there's a serious problem with making/selling proprietary games, either, even if you're generally committed to free software.
There is a quote: "When you stop growing you start dying" (William S. Burroughs). I am not sure I believe that the kind of governance that Apache is providing is helping to grow the projects under its supervision.
Your comparison to Terraform is also interesting. Apache Kafka, for example, has been absorbed by Amazon (MSK). Apache Spark is Amazon EMR. Just looking through Amazon's paid service offering I find several Apache projects rebranded and for sale. A cynical take could be that Apache is an org that helps companies like Amazon profit off of the work of open source developers.
But with software, sometimes there comes a time when it really should stop growing. When any further "enhancements" make the software worse.
It's something I've seen countless times in my life. A piece of software achieves something pretty close to perfection for its task, but the self-imposed "need" to continue development on it ruins it.
Certainly not everyone. Personally, I pay little attention to that sort of thing at all. I don't care if it's a "dead" project or not -- as long as the software is meeting my needs, that's the only thing that matters. If/when it stops doing that, then I'll look for alternatives.
Same here. I run Slackware on all of my engineering and development workstations. It does what I want, nothing gets hosed when running updates, and I don't feel like my main job is sysadmin.
But I keep getting told I need a "Slackware intervention" :P
The move to python 3 helped shake loose a number of text processing bugs with library I work on, that was never caught in python 2 with its loose goosy text type handling.
But as an end user, it's made using applications based on (or even tangentially using, as I learned first-hand a couple of months ago) Python highly problematic due to extreme version incompatibility.
I now try my best to avoid anything that involves Python.
Sorry but that's nonsense. Python 3 has been released in 2008 - 15 years ago. And the last Python 2 version has been EOLed 1.1.2020, three years ago, after a decade of deprecation!
With your argument about compatibility no programming language would ever be able to evolve or deprecate/remove some features. Look at how many things changed e.g. between recent C++, Rust or C# major releases. Python had only one major revision in 15 years in comparison!
If you are using software that still requires Python 2 that's very much a problem of that application and not Python. Complain to the vendor responsible, not about Python. They had ample time to update their code.
End users had no business touching Python 2 for at least a decade now. And upward compatibility between the point releases of Python is (and has been) generally pretty good.
I'm not lying. This problem cost me a full weekend earlier this year. I may have misremembered the exact version numbers, though. Perhaps it wasn't between 2 and 3. Is there a Python 4?
The problem is that you can't have one Python interpreter that covers all versions of Python, and Python is very unforgiving about using the wrong interpreter version.
In any case, it was a serious problem that cost me a lot of time and really soured me on Python as an end user. I've not encountered a similar issue with any other language before, so this appears to be uniquely a Python thing.
But I don't know. I'm happy enough to just avoid Python-based anything whenever possible now.
If you have downloaded Python 2, you must have done it intentionally, it isn't even available from the Python.org website download anymore - and had not been for a long time.
>The problem is that you can't have one Python interpreter that covers all versions of Python, and Python is very unforgiving about using the wrong interpreter version.
Because it doesn't make sense. The language evolves. Nobody is going to stop working on it only because it could break some old code somewhere. The changes from 2 to 3 happened *15 years ago*.
There is no reason to try to compile/run old Python 2 code today - and if you still do need it for some reason, then you need to download the Python 2 version (which are still available, if you need them but one has to look for them). But then you better know what you are doing.
If some old code requires Python 2, any somewhat experienced Python developer will spot that right away (e.g. the use of print statement in Python 2 vs. print() function in Python 3 is a dead giveaway).
>In any case, it was a serious problem that cost me a lot of time and really soured me on Python as an end user. I've not encountered a similar issue with any other language before, so this appears to be uniquely a Python thing.
I don't doubt it has costed you a lot of time but this was a problem entirely of your own doing by not doing your homework.
You would have exactly the same problems if you tried to compile old K&R C code or C++ code from 20 years ago using modern compilers. Or tried to feed modern C# code to a compiler from 10 years ago. Or, God forbid, tried to run some modern Javascript code using old browser - or that old HTML with Flash and what not in a modern browser ...
Python is actually much more lenient in this regard because a major language change has happened only once, 15 years ago, with Python 2 being deprecated for well over a decade. The point releases are all upward compatible with no issues.
I’m with you on Python 2 to 3 being a fine idea and an improvement but…
> You would have exactly the same problems if you tried to compile old K&R C code or C++ code from 20 years ago using modern compilers. Or tried to feed modern C# code to a compiler from 10 years ago.
If you feed 10 year old C# to a modern compiler it will compile it fine. I’d imagine most C and C++ of even 20-year vintage will still compile. The issue is of forward compatibility, not backwards.
It depends. Some projects can be retargeted to netstandard2.0/net6(8).0 without any changes at all, some require minor update of dependencies and some other - do face breaking changes in library code because APIs did get deprecated.
With that said, neither IL nor C# itself had any changes breaking forward compatibility (aside from a very early change to foreach recently discussed here).
all arguably true, but it has no bearing on whether 3 was necessary in the first place.
> With your argument about compatibility no programming language would ever be able to evolve
"evolve" and "change" are not ends in themselves. If it was usable as it was, then there was no need to evolve or change in an incompatible way.
15 years ago: also irrelevant. World War One was unnecessary, and that was 109 years ago. Whatever issues existed are sorted out by now, but that doesn't mean it had to happen.
There have been some very good reasons why Python 3 made those changes.
That you find them unnecessary because the original code was "usable as is" for you is irrelevant.
The reasons why these changes have been done (for a developer they have been fairly minor) has been hashed and rehashed for the past 15 years, Guido van Rossum wrote on it extensively too.
Most has been performance-related (Python 3 is significantly faster than 2) and probably the biggest user-visible change is the clean up of string handling with everything being Unicode now.
Frankly, anyone complaining about this stuff today is just beating the old dead horse for the sake of having something to complain about. The same like some people constantly bringing up the Linux systemd discussions after more than a decade, even though they are completely irrelevant today.
I'm fascinated at your characterization of both Kafka and Spark as being absorbed by Amazon.
AWS offers hosted versions of each. They are not, as you say "rebranded and for sale", but rather are hosted services, running whatever upstream releases.
But to say that the project as been absorbed by AWS (in either case) is simply false. Spark is developed by a community of numerous companies, of which Databricks is usually most prominent. Kafka is likewise a community of several organizations, of which Confluent tends to be the most influential.
Yes, Apache is (and always has been) business-friendly. The license enables companies to profit on those projects. But, for the most part, companies that benefit from those project also contribute back to them, as a way to ensure sustainability. That's how it is supposed to work.
death is part of life though, and the only thing that grows without and end is cancer (quite literally).
I don't see why project can't just be considered "done": yeah you update dependencies and make it work with new/current formats, but essentially it's done. The use case is now clearly defined, implemented and tested.
It needs at least a stable set of users, but maintaining a set of users is essentially managing the set of people onboarding and the set of people migrating off.
If you're shrinking then a competitor is providing better options, or your problem space has shifted.
Software as big as Open Office may not need to technically grow, but still needs a lot of work to stay current.
Various dependencies, like XML parsers, JPEG decoders, HTTP libraries, etc, change over time, drop deprecated APIs and need the main application to adapt. It'll also bump into the tech changing around it -- UTF8, year 2038, 64 bit CPUs, etc.
For a project this size it takes work just to stand still and keep it comfortably buildable on a modern Linux distro.
There is giant amount of actively worked upon, very heavily used software projects in Apache: Airflow, Spark, Flink, Kafka, Lucene and a lot of foundations on which those are written or use: Parquet, Arrow, Iceberg.
Maybe the real problem is that the ASF has been adopting too many abandoned projects that have been “donated” by much bigger entities (e.g. Google donating Wave).
This is the right thing to do from a helping the world perspective, but it’s clearly hurt ASF’s reputation.
They should simply start saying no to some of these dead/dying projects. Or at the very least brand them differently.
It's important to note that the ASF did say no to Wave. It never made it out of the Incubator, because it was unable to build an active user community.
And in addition, simply by virtue of going through the Incubator at all, these projects ensure that the source code is available under a well known, well understood, popular, ALv2 license - and the code, email archives, and other artifacts that were created are preserved by the ASF even when the project is sent to the Attic. This is still a net good for the world in general, IMO.
And while it's not exactly common there have been forks of Attic'd projects outside of the ASF that went on to be useful to people.
Apache has lots of active projects. But they are mostly data analysis. At work, we use Airflow to run Spark jobs which uses Hadoop and Hive.
Apache also has a lot of dead projects that never got picked up by users. Apache should have a marker for zombie projects so people don't start using them.
Software projects have a natural lifecycle, and since we've been around for almost 30 years, there's going to be a number of projects in that state.
However, the ASF doesn't force projects into the attic while they still have a community around them. OpenOffice is an edge case - there's still a project community, primarily around templates and other end-user-centric activities. They're just not doing much with the actual software any more.
Granted, there's room to disagree as to whether 1) the ASF should force projects into the attic and 2) whether OO actually has an active community. But the Foundation's position is that this is the decision of the project, not one to be forced top-down by the Board.
They do have the Apache Attic for that purpose, but they typically defer to the project maintainers to make the decision to retire a project, unless there are no longer any maintainers.
GitHub is an unfiltered firehose. The job of something like ASF is to curate. It used to be that an "Apache project" meant the same as "solid, popular, vouched for, safe to use".
> If a project ends up in Apache it feels to me like it has gone out to pasture.
There are many Apache Foundation projects that are active and important or complete and important.
Unfortunately OpenOffice is not any of the above, and it was that way almost from the beginning. The original OO community largely went with LibreOffice. They did not like the interference of Oracle and later IBM in their project's governance. So, Apache got the trademarks from Oracle and a community of people who were largely not maintainers. This put Apache, almost from day one, in position to be competing with the community of one of their own projects.
> I've felt for a long time (maybe even a decade) that Apache is the place OSS goes to retire/die.
It's a bit too strong as others have pointed out that there are very active projects under the Apache umbrella. But I do feel that there's a core of truth in this. Specifically, Apache does appear to provide a "way out" for large enterprise customers that want to dump non-strategic (to them) code somewhere and not necessarily invest in it. Seems something that could be solvable on the ASF side by having additional criteria before accepting projects, and maybe require a certain level of activity for continued membership.
>> > Apache is the place OSS goes to retire/die
>> Fortunately many of us in the world disagree with the dystopian warped view.
They would still be doing everyone a favor if they shut down OpenOffice completely and hand the trademark over to The Document Foundation. The name is better than LibreOffice, and the fact that a grossly outdated version of OpenOffice is what people will be finding is detrimental to the project. Most the developers and the code have moved on, but the name and a bunch of old code lives on with ASF for no good reason. Seriously there is NO reason for it except the completely selfish (and harmful to others) excuse that ASF can claim to be the stewards of OpenOffice. In my dystopian imaginary world they are even paid to maintain this situation to prevent more widespread adoption of LibreOffice.
At work I've lovingly but sadly referred to Apache as the "Crazy Cat Lady of Software." From the outside it looks like they're willing to take on any project that someone wants to give away regardless of whether they have the capacity to provide maintenance / governance of it themselves.
While I do love the preservation aspect of it, seeing that a project is maintained by Apache rings the same "Sure, but is the project already dead" bells in my head that I hear when I see a project from Google. In both cases, the name brings the concern that a project might be on its way out.
I was recently searching around for a good enterprise search engine and wanted something OSS. I found Apache Lucene and so far I really like it. It's got documentation, a clear release schedule, and I know lots of other people use it. I was happy to hear that it's Apache because it probably means it won't die because one maintainer goes away. Maybe it's silly, but if I find a project is Apache it gives me a good feeling.
Of course some of their projects die. That's OSS. But that's not something you can solve for. Even paid software goes away after awhile.
Unless it’s one of their many durable Java projects, or the web server that bares its name.
I think some things were (are?) bad fits for the ASF and languished as a result.
If you do a lot of development in the JVM ecosystem though you’ll find there’s a lot of ASF projects that are actively used and maintained
Go to die, or go to provide incremental improvements? Maybe a bit of both? Either said, it's a good question.
Some projects are going to die, and I don't think that's the fault of the organization behind it. I'd love to see a more detailed analysis of all the current projects at Apache, and their growth/decline, and a breakdown of _why_ they're growing or declining. Maybe Apache is the problem, maybe it isn't.
A big part of the problem is that the Apache foundation has become sort of a dumping ground for OSS projects where the corporate sponsor doesn’t want to be responsible anymore. They pull the full time developers and donate the project. In this context it’s not surprising that these projects “die”, because they’ve lost most or all of their contributors.
I believe that the death blow which lead to the fork LibreOffice was the lack of trust in Oracle commitment to Open Office and open source in general, after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems.
Sun indeed had largely reduced its involvement in the project in the last years, and there was the "Symphony incident" [1]. The death blow was when Oracle arrived, started the trial with Google over Java/Android, inherited MySQL and almost killed it, inherited OpenOffice and the future did not look bright anymore [2, in German]
At about the same Sun, Oracle, IBM et al were cooling on the idea of developing comprehensive office software suites (~2008–2012), online suites like Google Workspace and Zoho were arriving in force, as were supporting do-business-online-not-on-the-desktop tools like Wrike.
If the OpenOffice kerfuffles weren't sapping enough energy out of the ecosystem, that users could suddenly use free, no-install-ever, not-equivalent-but-still-fine online tools did the rest.
Used to be an enthusiastic OpenOffice and LibreOffice user and developer—not of the core tools, but as part of bigger document processing and publishing workflows. Even presented at the OpenOffice Conference in 2007 (Moit de gust, Barcelona!) But after Google Docs, Sheets, etc. ... have not needed OpenOffice or LibreOffice nor used them in anger for over a decade.
> I believe that the death blow which lead to the fork LibreOffice was the lack of trust in Oracle commitment to Open Office and open source in general, after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems.
I mean... can you blame them? I would have forked too, if anything out of caution. The lawnmower has no feeling.
Well, my understanding is that right after Oracle acquired Sun it found itself with a free database engine it did not need because it would compete with its own "free" Oracle XE product offering.
There was a lot of uncertainty about the future of MySQL... The original authors forked MariaDB and MySQL for many months did not receive any update.
Apache's stubborn refusal to direct OpenOffice users towards LibreOffice has done immeasurable harm to the Apache brand and it's basically ruined the OpenOffice brand. A great example of the damage that can be done by poor stewardship.
Yeah, I agree. I think it would make sense to have a big disclaimer on the OpenOffice site saying "No longer maintained, please consider using these alternatives..." and link to a few other open source office suites (e.g. LibreOffice, Caligra)
I'd argue that "adding spaces to the readme" is really stretching the definition of the word "maintained". If they're not fixing bugs (particularly security bugs), and if they're not adding new features, what exactly are they "maintaining"?
And "doesn't really change much" is not a bad thing, it's an okay preference to have. I'd be perfectly happy using Opera 12 from 2012 – "warts and all" – with some minor changes (it actually runs fairly well today, with the major problem being lack of CSS variables, JS template strings, and a few other relatively minor additions).
Has it? I have used both libreoffice and openoffice, I had no idea openoffice was related to asf until I read your post. I have heard other talk about how people should use libreoffice, but it isn't apparent why.
Back in the day there was real interest in "OpenOffice" among non-geeks. Governments were mandating that documents be published in OpenDocument format. Microsoft sought to muddy the waters by publishing the confusing "Office Open XML" format (which they then never implemented).
And then OpenOffice the project just... stopped. No new features, and eventually no new releases. And by squatting on the brand, they prevented that momentum from transferring to LibreOffice.
Oh and I forgot to mention the guy (whose name I have thankfully forgotten) that the Apache Software Foundation hired to go and troll the LibreOffice community in public forums across the Internet. A tradition that other OpenOffice "community" members have continued (e.g., if you mention LibreOffice on /r/openoffice your post will be removed and you will be banned).
> Governments were mandating that documents be published in OpenDocument format. Microsoft sought to muddy the waters by publishing the confusing "Office Open XML" format (which they then never implemented).
And don't forget, bought off standardization organizations around the world to have it declared a "standard." I wonder if LibreOffice should come out with a LibreDocument format to combat the confusion between ODF and OOXML and to further distance itself from OpenOffice (and as a middle finger to OpenOffice/Apache for squatting on the brand).
To a point where your program won't understand/be able to edit a simple document created by Microsoft tools. In some cases, you'll see an embedded binary blob that's actually an ActiveX executable in an OLE container.
>> I have heard other talk about how people should use libreoffice, but it isn't apparent why.
Because there is almost a decade of enhancements and improvements to LibreOffice that are not present in OpenOffice. It's simply a better tool suite and there is no disputing that. If you try you'd be trolling.
> almost a decade of enhancements and improvements to LibreOffice
including, very notably, LibreOffice speaks the current ODF formats and of course the Apache OpenOffice from 2014 (yes, that's the last time they released a new minor version of their software everything since then is just patch fixes) does not.
I think the continued co-opting of the name of a first nation as their "brand" despite repeated calls from stake holders to do otherwise has caused plenty of harm to the ASF brand.
It's no worse than Amazon being named after the rainforest and river despite not originating there, or Apple being named after the fruit despite not being a greengrocer. Names get reused, it's not a big deal.
Amazon is a place. Apple is a fruit. Apache is a people. Specifically, a people that had genocide committed against them. It’s at least a little worse.
> Co-founder Brian Behlendorf states how the name 'Apache' was chosen: "I suggested the name Apache partly because the web technologies at the time that were launching were being called cyber this or spider that or something on those themes and I was like we need something a little more interesting, a little more romantic, not to be a cultural appropriator or anything like that, I had just seen a documentary about Geronimo and the last days of a Native American tribe called the Apaches, right, who succumbed to the invasion from the West, from the United States, and they were the last tribe to give up their territory and for me that almost romantically represented what I felt we were doing with this web-server project..."
Hm, interesting. I guess they both could be true, like I could totally see myself sitting around trying to come up with a fun name for my software project and being influenced by a film I saw the previous weekend. But given that the documentary where the quote originated smells more like marketing than anything else, I would not be surprised at all if this were indeed a retcon. I wish the docu was still up.
When Microsoft started getting into the web server business with the gift that keeps on giving that’s IIS, they were using that “patchy server” as a dig on Apache and how more professional IIS is. The Apache project then scrubbed it from all their docs.
I'll take it that you really want the answer to these questions. The Apache are a group of tribes in Southwest. The name comes from Spanish when the Conquistadors invaded. The tribes didn't have a strong group identity. This changed over the next few hundred years.
More than can fit in an HN comment, entire cultures were destroyed. This was through disease, war, imprisonment, and outright repression. "Apache" is an identity that some still hold on to after this genocide. And someone saw this history, thought what these people went through "romantically represented" his web server project, and took on the name.
If you don't see how this is any different from calling your company Apple so you show up ahead of Atari in the phone book, I don't know what to tell you.
Last time I checked it was a small organisation run by 2 or 3 people with no real standing to speak for anyone but themselves. And AFAIK that was also the only time a major objection was raised.
And look, if you dislike the name then by all means voice your objections and let's have the discussion. I dislike the reactionary "STFU" response, which just shuts every discussion down. What I also dislike is this kind of pretence, which also shuts down the discussion.
I don't recall tell anyone to STFU, I'm just doing what you said, voicing my objections. The brand is tarnished in my eyes by their use of the name of a first nation.
I think your comment is pretty good evidence that I haven't shut down any discussion, I just know where I stand on the matter.
> Most of the commits here seams to be mainly white space changes to random files.
It might not be "learning" but rather an attempt to game GitHub (e.g. rack up a lot of commits to important-sounding repos). My understanding is go around using automated tools to submit PRs that fix whitespace and typos in order to do that.
The trunk branch, the Bugzilla list, the OS/2 support, the user forums, the multi-hour build process, the XHTML 1.0 compliant badge on the https://www.openoffice.org/ homepage .....
Many years ago I became proficient with the Linux kernel build process, and later regularly built Mozilla with my preferred configuration and so forth. Both processes take some doing. I thought building OpenOffice couldn't be much of a challenge, it wasn't an operating system after all. I can't recall if I ever got it done. If I did, it was certainly the most vanilla possible build, taking all the defaults for a bog-standard build.
Remembering when I spent three days compiling OOo from FreeBSD ports, to get a build that didn't work, then discovering that this was a known broken port. I started using the Linux binary in emulation instead.
Well, Linux is just kernel, and as such doesn't take so much time to build. A whole operating system (depending on what's in scope) would take hours or even days
I unfortunately stopped daily driving gentoo right as core counts in consumer machines started to go above 1. I have played around w/ it a few times since, and was blown away by how much faster emerges go when you add ever increasing numbers to -j in your make opts.
Building large software is consistently the only useful thing I can do that will fully utilize all CPU resources. Seeing all the bars in the red in htop on a box with a lot of threads doesn't get old.
> A whole operating system (depending on what's in scope) would take hours or even days
I'm sure a full OS can take that long (ex. Windows, probably), but at least NetBSD can build a whole OS from source quite quickly. (Of course, NetBSD makes an effort to optimize that process; their build.sh is really a thing of beauty)
As a first approximation, one would not expect building a suite of office tools to be more complex than building an operating system kernel.
Also, for the people saying "it's only the kernel, not the whole O/S", consider that building the kernel requires having a running system with all the dependencies.
> As a first approximation, one would not expect building a suite of office tools to be more complex than building an operating system kernel.
Honestly I would. Kernel is not that big if you look away from all the device drivers (you usually don't need all of them) and has a focus on minimalism. An office suite is a massive complexity monster which skews on supporting more stuff even if it means having more code.
> 3. Honestly, just who cares? So what if OpenOffice is just being minimally kept alive?
The post is about the fact that it is _deceptively_ minimally kept alive.
A significant part of the decision process involving OSS choice is measuring active maintenance. Surely, these commits exist to give a false impression here, which down the road can harm those using unmaintained software.
How is it deceptive? Are they bumping version numbers? Are they packaging new releases?
Edit: before I'm accused of not reading the article, I did, but I did not look at the actual OpenOffice download page. The current release, dated April 2023, includes the following, which seems substantially more than "whitespace cleanup" as TFA author claims, but seems quite in line with software that is being maintained but not actively developed:
Other Improvements/Enhancements
Writer: Dialog "Frame" in Writer / automatic size / changing shortcut keys (German)
Calc: Protect Table – Dialog too narrow for German heading string
Base: Dialog text in "Datenbank austauschen" (exchange database) dialog is cut (German)
Calc: Use the existing icon for "Remove Filter" in toolbar and menu
Calc: Text in cell comments is more readable
Calc: Added support for Excel 2010s DateTime type cells.
Bug Fixes
Calc: Rich text cells imported from XLSX files have their contents duplicated
Several fixes for importing OOXML documents
All applications: Import fails when the Relationship "Target" attribute in _rels/.rels has superfluous slashes
Calc: XLSX with omitted cell references opens with empty cells
Calc: no text imported from XSLX when xl/sharedStrings.xml has wrong case
Several fixes for importing MS Excel 2003 SpreadsheetML files
Calc: ss:DateTime cell value is loaded as either only a date or a time
Calc: fractional seconds are silently ignored during import
Calc: cell with ss:MergeAcross="0" gets an extra empty cell to the right
Calc: import corrupts references to columns that are multiples of 26 (eg. Z)
Writer: Importing apostrophes from HTML fails
Calc: Cut-and-paste between spreadsheets causes incorrect cell reference changes
Writer: Awkward Chinese (ZH-TW) numbering suffix when importing RTF document
Calc: Last CSV line is silently lost on import if last field is quoted and end-of-file is reached before closing quote
It damages both the Apache and OpenOffice brands. People who have heard of MS Office alternatives have probably OpenOffice in their mind and will attempt to use it. They will probably be dissatisfied and have a bad impression of OpenOffice, Apache, and OpenSource in general.
> 3. Honestly, just who cares? So what if OpenOffice is just being minimally kept alive?
The pretense that this project is alive and not a zombie puts millions of users in danger who are downloading insecure trash under the impression that this is a live project that's the OpenOffice they've heard so much about.
They definitely are relevant despite what the armchair experts say on HN. Do you use AWS or GCP or Fastly? These companies don't provide huge sponsorship dollars to Apache out of the goodness of their hearts. Many of the cloud services you use are backed by one or more Apache projects.
>> Many of the cloud services you use are backed by one or more Apache projects.
So name the projects being used and not the dollars flowing to ASF. Also this is completely orthogonal to the fact that they keep OpenOffice "alive" strictly selfishly for their own benefit and to the detriment of LibreOffice.
Apache HTTPd accounts for nearly a third of the webservers in use on the internet today.
Apache Arrow underpins a swathe of datascience tooling, as does Apache Parquet.
Then there's Apache Kafka, and Apache Hadoop, naturally.
Apache Maven is still the predominant tool for doing Java compilation, and in the Java space lets not forget such things as Log4J, where we saw absolute chaos a couple of years ago caused by those vulnerabilities in it. Most of the cloud services you interact with, especially at Amazon, are written in Java.
The list of crucial projects leveraged by the wider industry goes on and on and on.
Yes, Apache seems to end up as a dumping ground for an awful lot of open source projects, but that's not all it is.
Okay, so we've known this is happening for a while. But why though?
First, I don't understand what's the ASF's position here. Do they have some political reason to keep kicking this can down the road? Is there money on the line? Is it just somebody refusing to give up?
And given the licensing allows, why don't they rebrand LibreOffice, rather than keeping a zombie of a project?
Or why don't they just make some sort of deal with LibreOffice?
I believe a key issue is that the license of LibreOffice is copyleft (I believe some mixture of LGPL and MPL) and so the Apache Foundation--which specifically focuses on code that is not copyleft (a focus I personally disagree with, but is at least consistent)--feels something is lost to the world if they truly give up on the one permissively-licensed open source office suite.
That's a good point I haven't seen brought up before when this topic comes up. That really does make a lot of sense explaining why Open Office still exists, but not why Apache is not being transparent about the situation.
The pointless commits combined with the lack of transparency feel a bit nefarious. I wonder if it's more about personal drama between the projects than anything else?
Then again, the Apache2-licensed OpenOffice is not lost to the world even if it sits in attic.apache.org. If and when someone wants to maintain it, it can be resurrected.
You're completely right! The issue is, this mandate is being made by corporate donors and influencers which is why ASF should be a 501(c)(6) not a 501(c)(3) that it is. It's probably breaking the law, but at least unethical.
>> I believe a key issue is that the license of LibreOffice is copyleft (I believe some mixture of LGPL and MPL) and so the Apache Foundation--which specifically focuses on code that is not copyleft (a focus I personally disagree with, but is at least consistent)--feels something is lost to the world if they truly give up on the one permissively-licensed open source office suite.
And here I thought they were just against OpenOffice, this interpretation pits them against Free Software more generally. I'm gonna run with that for a while and see how it fits.
The ASF does not tell projects what to do. It provides a process and a place, and gives projects autonomy. The project, not the foundation, decides to keep running the project. So to characterize the ASF as "kicking this can down the road" for some kind of inscrutable motivation is just not how things work.
The members of the OO project want to keep running their project. They have a group of people who keep showing up to do user support, documentation, and produce a huge community around their templates. They just haven't pushed any new features for a while. But they still are there, keeping the lights on.
The ASF is not a top-down organization. It's driven entirely by those projects. And if you look at the dev list - https://lists.apache.org/list.html?dev@openoffice.apache.org - you'll note that this issue gets raised on a VERY regular basis, and the project participants always say "no thanks."
As to "making a deal with LibreOffice", I would encourage you to read the mailing list, where that, too, gets raised with great regularity. There, too, the community sentiment is "no thanks." On both sides.
Read what Rich wrote more carefully. It leterally does not come up often in that context. I got involved with OpenOffice once it came to the Incubator. I've put many many unpaid hours on the project. Mostly by supporting the websites and forum installations, but also by catherding on security.
BTW - You can get help on LibreOffice on the OpenOffice Fora. Those people are there to help people.
I've made $0 on twelve years of work. I am currently the VP, OpenOffice (we rotate because it's a governance role).
If you interested in helping then the type of developer needed is someone who understands old C++ and has a passion to modernize that.
> If you interested in helping then the type of developer needed is someone who understands old C++ and has a passion to modernize that.
Adding myself to AOO as a C++ dev would be counter to the interests of the users - it would add to the impression that this dead project was not dead.
You've got pull requests waiting that go back to 2019. Dave, why aren't you pushing or rejecting any of those?
If I was interested in helping I'd be steering people away from the dead security hazard to the live project that has developers. And it turns out I already do that.
The most useful way to help AOO users is to shoot AOO through the head and send them to LibreOffice. AOO doesn't appear to have the devs to maintain a user-facing project securely.
> The most useful way to help AOO users is to shoot AOO through the head and send them to LibreOffice.
Maybe we could get some bored whitehat to mine some 0days for a few weeks, then send them all at once, wait for inevitable 90 days, and then release high+ severity CVEs.
ASF rules require a report from the PMC at every third month. There reports are written by the Project Membership Committee, and checked by the Board. (I know that they really read them).
Board reports (including project reports) are open (with 1-2 month delay, they are published only after approval, at the next Board Meeting).
Of course everyone agrees with OP's post. It's been dead for a while. We've been trying to convince Apache leadership to kill it forever. The problem is that the ASF is fundamentally broken. It's just a fake 501(c)(3) which actually runs like a 501(c)(6) -- which serves corporate interests, and it should be shutdown. All their projects are just about serving corporations instead of the public good, as legally required under the tax code for this organization.
A 501(c)(3) is a non-profit organization that exists to serve the public good. A 501(c)(6) is a non-profit organization that exists to serve its membership. So like a bunch of businesses in a city get together to form an organization that works for their common good. The business organization doesn't make a profit, each individual business makes a profit and pays their taxes.
A 501(c)(3) has a lot more restrictions than a 501(c)(6), so you might wonder why a 501(c)(6) would want to be organized as a 501(c)(3). Well, that's because donations to a 501(c)(3) are tax deductible and donations to a 501(c)(6) are not. So basically, tax avoidance by the people contributing to the organization. If those same people are the ones that created/run the organization, you might even claim that it is criminal tax fraud (I am not making that claim - I don't know enough about the ASF to have an opinion). But keep in mind that the amount of money that ASF brings in and/or spends each year is basically nothing compared to what WikiMedia or Mozilla deals with. I'm not sure that these corporations would go to the effort for such a tiny amount of money.
Maybe it started out with good intentions, and has slowly evolved to be worthless from a public good standpoint.
501c3's get tax breaks, 501c6' don't. C3's are supposed to be for charitable, religious, and educational organizations, C6's are for chambers of commerce or business leagues, like the ABA which is all the lawyers.
When there's so little developer interest that remote code execution vulnerabilities are unfixed over a year after being disclosed (https://lwn.net/Articles/699047/) and most of the developer activity is one person changing whitespace around so the project's GitHub page has a green activity graph, I think it's irresponsible of Apache to act like OpenOffice is still an active project instead of redirecting users to LibreOffice (or giving them the trademark).
While doing that to prevent people to find out that LibreOffice is what they are actually looking for. (I can’t help but think this is a conscious effort to harm LibreOffice)
Spamming the Apache Org with emails isn't going to change anything. There's no indication OP has even attempted to engage with the org and be told "No, we're keeping it alive" or similar.
This is straight to the signing petitions / harassment stage, without bothering to do anything else.
> we find that whitespace changes are not just part of the commits that Apache Open Office has been receiving, whitespace changes make up a substantial amount of the commits added to the repository.
All these commits are so strange. They are all useless "clean up" commits yet they are not done by a bot, there's someone manually making these changes every few days, almost every day actually.
Don't know if he's really trying to make the project seem active, or trying to score a certain number of commits, or if he's just really passionate about cleaning up that codebase all by himself.
Mostly to me, it shows the importance of a sane lint/format step in the pre-commit hook, it prevents engineers spending an near-infinite amount of time on this type of cleanup.
I don't see anything particularly strange about them. This recent commit, for example, fixes some typos and changes some formatting a bit. HN seems to be taking a very conspiratorial turn in its thinking recently.
Are there so few bugs and issues in OpenOffice that, for months, the most pressing matter is to fix the incorrect use of "its" in comments?
I mean this person is German (their Github bio). Even if they're not a programmer, why don't they instead take the time to translate some of the many german source files to english, like Libreoffice did back in 2013[1]?
Everyone knows that Apache's OpenOffice is barely maintained. That's not a reason to attribute nefarious motives to the person making these commits. This whole thread is going a bit bonkers making unfounded accusations about this particular individual.
Yeah I don't think anyone is doing anything nefarious here, and I definitely don't want to accuse anyone of acting in that way. I have my own weird hobbies.
I still don't think it's in the project's interest to have these changes merged in, they just confuse the history & make it harder to track down relevant context.
I'm really confused about this. It's the slimmest possible veneer, collapsing upon a cursory browse of the commit history. Why put in the time to update at all?
It seems to me that Apache started out as a general software conservancy, but they have become hyperfocused on -vaguely - big data infrastructure. They have collected many useful projects (OpenOffice, Subversion, NetBeans, Maven, Groovy), but those projects are now being left to rot. Meanwhile, Apache has also collected a huge percentage of the big data infrastructure world (Kafka, Avro, Druid, Flume, Flink, Hive, Hadoop, HBase, Mesos, Spark, Solr, Pig, you get the idea) and those are watered and made to flourish. Not sure why they hold onto OpenOffice and Subversion with a dying grasp, but I assume it's a lack of leadership.
OpenOffice is dead but who cares? ASF doesn’t really spend any funds on it, it doesn’t eat away any attention, doesn’t really fork the community because nobody really cares about ooo, at least there is something stable there. I don’t know, there are things that gets me from my chair more.
Like the weirdness with “libreoffice versions” forced by collabora. (I understand, collabora spends a lot of money developing libreoffice so they want some money back on support, but it is so hard to understand those versions…)
One issue is that OpenOffice has had unfixed remote code execution vulnerabilities for years, but won't shepherd it's users to the actually maintained version, while still pretending to be under active maintenance itself in what's a hop, skip, and a jump away from fraud IMO.
Isn't that just in Europe? They can forbid whatever they want, good luck stopping an open source project from getting installed because of security reasons lol
I guess it won't be prepacked in distros but I'm not sure any distro still ships with OO.
Or the committer is making very small changes that are hard too see amongst the massive whitespace changes his auto-formatter makes every time she saves a
>Or the committer is making very small changes that are hard too see amongst the massive whitespace changes his auto-formatter makes every time she saves a
I wonder what would happen if someone just bought openoffice.net and tried to get the top slot on Google for "open office". Would Apache sue? Or would they be appropriately ashamed into doing nothing?
What would you suggest for a free app with all features provided by a typical office suite? One option is Libre Office, but the interface seems outdated and most times it does not have many features you might expect of an office app. Is there any other office suite app that you would suggest?
Apache is somehow very partial to Java OSS projects (56.5% seems to be the current count - probably some underlying network effects at work) so its relevance and impact follows that of the Java ecosystem. Which is not dying but it is not creating waves of excitement either.
But we can add the current Open Office debacle to the cumulating data points indicating that after decades of both wins and failures FOSS has cumulated both battle scars and lots of dead wood. The dead wood may just be ignored or relegated to fertilizer but it might also destroy the forest in a wildfire.
Developing an open source "office suite" that is ready for the next decade of ubiquitous ML/AI is a highly non-trivial task and LibreOffice is not exactly trailblazing the way. It will take proactive, smart and effective collaboration by many actors to achieve this.
>I am not sure why a productivity suite have to be ML/AI powered tho.
A lot of users live in countries other than the English-speaking ones, and a built-in, really great (like Deepl-great, not Google translate bad) translation system would help them a lot.
Also: functionality to tell the AI what kind of letter you want it to write and give it a couple of key info and it does the rest.
> I am not sure why a productivity suite have to be ML/AI powered tho.
In order to continue being relevant?
Functions like search and spell checking are already basic forms of ML/AI. A productivity suite should enable users to benefit from ever more powerful algorithms that, ahem, enhance productivity :-)
“The Apache Attic was created in November 2008 to provide process and solutions to make it clear when an Apache project has reached its end of life.” https://attic.apache.org/
Either the Project Management Commitee kicks it off, or the ASF's board does it. The fake activity in the repo is probably supposed to prevent attracting attention from the board:
> When should a project move to the Attic?
> Projects whose PMC are unable to muster 3 votes for a release, who have no active committers or are unable to fulfill their reporting duties to the board are all good candidates for the Attic.
No, the commit activity is not to prevent attracting the attention of the board, since the board does not monitor commit activity as a metric of project health.
No commit activity would indicate though that there are no active committees, which is one of the criteria whether a project belongs to the attic. Dunno whether that's one of the metrics or whether it is evaluated as required. However, usually people don't try to nefariously keep projects alive.
ASF is where software goes to "retire"; but retirement in this context is an euphemism for dying.
truth is that the Apache Software Foundation is a software graveyard; this is known but not really "seriously" acknowledged.
going straight away from the topic: why our culture does this? so many things are like this: there's a reality (ASF is a graveyard) but it's like rough or impolite to be upfront about it (but nooo, it's just 'stable' software... which may be in some cases but also it also may be dead and unused, people lie)
clearly in the ASF somebody is getting paid for 'maintaining' Apache's version of star office, but clearly somebody is doing a bit of a fraud....
OpenOffice is a zombie living on the old name alone. LibreOffice is the "new" (it's like over a decade old i think) current one and e.g. ships preinstalled on big ubuntu images, for instance.
It depends on what features you need. Libre Office is a suite with database, word processor, spreadsheet, Abiword is just a word processor, WordGrinder is terminal based program specifically for first drafts that can export to ODT, HTML, etc., O20.Word is a clone of MS Word 2019, there are more: Calligrawords, Focuswriter, etc.
Abiword is probably the best compromise between simplicity, familiarity, and features. It's also very lightweight.
You are quite right, it was just a sudden thought before I hit the submit button that such a tool can actually be just as useful as a WYSIWYG word processor.
Does anyone remember Wordstar? It was not WYSIWYG but it was perfectly usable. I wrote hundreds of pages of documentation using it on a Z80 extension to an Apple ][. In my opinion such a word processor is in fact more productive than WYSIWYG. Moving to MS Word was a step backwards.
While it is true that OpenOffice didn't get major updates for nearly a decade, it does what it's supposed to do, and is pretty stable. I still use it as it's faster than LibreOffice and I'm used to it.
And why spam Apache to deprecate OO? It's not like OO is doing any harm for Apache or its users, one can install LibreOffice instead if they want it.
The allegation upthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37646366) was that security fixes are so slow to come out that it is more or less irrelevant that they eventually get released. While OO release notes do list security issues that are fixed in that release, I can't seem to find info about when each was found/reported so it's hard for me to tell whether that particular example was unusually long or not; if you have evidence that the process has improved that would be useful to know.
> We do wish to know about security problems. We are an all volunteer project. AFAIK No one is paid anything to work on Apache OpenOffice
That makes it understandable that people can't commit to working on it, but isn't exactly a counterargument to "the project doesn't patch quickly". Like, it's not a personal attack, it's a breakdown of risk factors, in which case nobody getting paid to care is another argument that the product won't fix vulnerabilities quickly.
It didn't, OpenOffice hasn't been active for many years. Office365 (and its bundling with Teams) is however a challenge for LibreOffice, the actually active development branch.
Thanks for posting about Apache, now I remember I wanted to look into switching back to OpenOffice from LibreOffice to compare. OpenOffice I'm hoping didn't ditch Java like the folks at LibreOffice did.
Why do you care if your office suite is requires Java as a build dependency? Oh right, I see you're new here and probably just trolling in favor of this nonsense.
I mean, this happened a long long time ago. LibreOffice inherited approximately 100% of developer effort.
The problem is that Apache is effectively lying about OpenOffice still being a thing, and trapping less-savvy users who aren't aware of this context into an office suite frozen in time in 2014.
For the record, Oracle didn't kill OO on purpose, they just fumbled with it. Despite what they might have pretended in sales demo at the time, they've never been in the business of building office suites, let alone opensource ones, so they didn't really know how to deal with it. In the end they even did the right thing, by passing it on to Apache, when they could have just quietly strangled it in a basement.
Ironically, one of the most anti-Microsoft companies ever unwittingly managed to do Microsoft a massive favour.
The charitable interpretation is that it applies to RMS and RMS only, and the author has some knowledge of an objectively measurable decline in his programming skills.
The more general interpretation is that the author of that page is egregiously ageist.
>“I want to stress the importance of being young and technical,” he stated. If you want to found a successful company, you should only hire young people with technical expertise. “Young people are just smarter,” he said with a straight face.
In fairness to Zuckerberg, he was only 22 when he said that; it's kind of typical youthful hubris that many of us probably had to some degree. I'm fairly certain current 39-year old Zuckerberg would think it's a load of bollocks.
It is also a totally unfair characterization. I mean, they still house relevant projects including Kafka, Lucene, Zookeeper, Spark, Arrow and many others.
But it does feel Apache lives in a kind of stasis, a relic of the "old" web, like geocities sites or MySpace. If a project ends up in Apache it feels to me like it has gone out to pasture.
1. https://projects.apache.org/projects.html