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The Apache foundation is way larger than just the server


Yes, I agree. However a lot of their forward facing projects seem to be effective abandon-ware (few people interested in contributing, competing more popular solutions based on forks, or just no longer relevant).

These projects don't give the apache foundation an appearance of importance or relevance, rather they make it look rather rundown.


That's how open-source abandonware is supposed to work though: the idea is that whenever a (for-profit) company produces something that it can't afford to run anymore but also can't afford to shut-down and damage their customer relationships, then they'll open-source the project and give it to an open-source foundation for stewardship and repo hosting. Yes, it's where software goes-to-die-a-long-death, but it also gives some people hope, and the possibility of giving it a new life in future. Currently, the Apache Foundation is the go-to place for that, and it benefits everyone considering the alternatives are worse.

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 would consider Airflow, Spark and Flink to be their forward facing projects, and they are all very actively developed.


The Apache Foundation also takes on projects that are literally abandoned. It acts as an umbrella that takes over hosting a project for commercial actors that can no longer develop it, but want to at least give existing users a open source (Apache License) version of the software to continue with/depend on.




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