rbowen

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.

FWIW, the article has an invalid email address in it, so nobody's getting those messages.

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/[email protected] - 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.

The ASF does have a marker for retired projects. See https://attic.apache.org/

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.

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.

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.

The dates on that page were always dependent on Red Hat. In retrospect, obviously we should have made that clearer, and we will endeavor to do so in the future.

Not only does this not "stick it to the man", it's directly addressed in the FAQ. If folks want to boot up another rebuild project, there's nothing preventing that. There are also several existing ones that you could go join.

So ... I wrote that, and it's worth mentioning that I knew Noirin before the preference for different pronouns was stated. That is, I knew Noirin, as mentioned in my blog post, during the ASF days, before they moved away from ASF activity into other areas of activism. Thus, I used the pronoun which was preferred at the time of our acquaintance. Much like people that knew me as a kid call me "Richard" and people that knew me in college call me "Rich", likewise, people that knew Noirin earlier and later will likely use different pronouns, based on the norms at the time. No disrespect is meant, just fond memories of a too-short friendship.