[this text was written by mikeal originally here but somehow got censored. gist exactly as he wrote it https://gist.github.com/1387977]
This is perhaps the most depressing response I've received to my article.
As I said in my article this is far less about git and more about the chasm that has grown between Apache and the rest of the community.
Your first two points boil down to "nobody makes you join Apache, if you don't like our policies then you can get out". How does this help Apache or its projects?
Apache could still be valuable to the community but this kind of stubborn attitude will insure that it continues to become irrelevant when it could be a leader.
I do understand the purpose of Apache and it is not hosting source code. That is the point I'm trying to make. If that is not its value, and its policies around hosting that source are no longer beneficial to its projects, then it should change its policy.
I think that you, and many people in the ASF, have married the existing policies of Apache with the purposes for which they were created. While the intentions of the policies may still be relevant, and in my opinion correct, the policies themselves will not remain relevant forever in a field as rapidly evolving as technology and GitHub may just be the first example of Apache policy incompatibility with evolution of open source.
The Apache Foundation is what you make of it. It will not change just because you post to your blog, but it will change if you engage the committer and membership population, build a consensus around your ideas and volunteer to do the actual work to make the changes happen.
No one will force you to do such work and if you don't want to do it, then you're not obligated to do so. No one will be upset if you, I or anyone else leaves the Foundation. It's cool. We're all here at-will, volunteering effort and code.
Apache cannot be everything to everyone, despite how much it is pulled to be so. Right now it fills a particular important role in the open source and larger software ecosystems. It's in that position due to both historical precedent as well as intentional decisions by the membership body.
But trust me, no one in Apache is ever, ever completely satisfied with the Foundation. That's to be expected -- the organization is driven by the compromises of a large group of people with different ideas and expectations. To balance between the chaos of constant change and the death of no change, the organization has grown guidelines and rules from the collected wisdom of its membership. This gives us at least some framework by which to evolve.
As for hosting code, there have been proposals at time for Apache to push the code hosting to some other organization. Once it was SourceForge, then Google Code, now Github. Of course, it's a tricky situation as the Foundation has particular requirements and wants to know its code will be around for decades. Moreover, infra team is constantly understaffed and thus are a very, very conservative bunch. We've seen way too many people jump in with a great idea and then leave maintenance to someone else. They're stubborn for a reason.
And perhaps Apache and Github are incompatible. So what? Github is a tool. It's incompatible with lots and lots of organizations and ways of doing things. The FSF has its rules and culture. Same with the Linux kernel, distros and desktops like KDE and Gnome. Android is different too. Not all of those mesh with Github and that's fine.
> The Apache Foundation is what you make of it. It will not change just because you post to your blog, but it will change if you engage the committer and membership population, build a consensus around your ideas and volunteer to do the actual work to make the changes happen.
This is true only from a CYA standpoint. As Mikeal said in the article, it's possible to do a lot of work and build up a strong case for a change that's important to project maintainers, yet still have Apache come up with excuses for why it can't happen. This is what happened with git -- twice.
I believe he did engage the committer and membership population. You're response, disagreement or not, is proof of that. Disparaging the way he did it with statements like "just because you post to your blog" is completely unfair.
Linux is a bad example. It's not "community" development by any real definition of it, because Linus controls everything that goes into the mainline codebase. If anything, it's community maintenance, because that is delegated out.
More importantly, Git by itself does not promote community development. No source control system does. Some make that style of development easier, but none of them actually directly promote it.
GitHub is not Git. GitHub is the Git version of SourceForge. Nearly all the community development features(bug tracking, forums, etc.) on both sites are built beside the source control system, and aren't really integrated directly to either Git or SVN.
I don't understand why this response is "depressing" and characterizing the reply as "about git" is, frankly, not representative of the post I just read.
This is perhaps the most depressing response I've received to my article.
As I said in my article this is far less about git and more about the chasm that has grown between Apache and the rest of the community.
Your first two points boil down to "nobody makes you join Apache, if you don't like our policies then you can get out". How does this help Apache or its projects?
Apache could still be valuable to the community but this kind of stubborn attitude will insure that it continues to become irrelevant when it could be a leader.
I do understand the purpose of Apache and it is not hosting source code. That is the point I'm trying to make. If that is not its value, and its policies around hosting that source are no longer beneficial to its projects, then it should change its policy.
I think that you, and many people in the ASF, have married the existing policies of Apache with the purposes for which they were created. While the intentions of the policies may still be relevant, and in my opinion correct, the policies themselves will not remain relevant forever in a field as rapidly evolving as technology and GitHub may just be the first example of Apache policy incompatibility with evolution of open source.