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Ben Cherian, Chief Strategy Officer at Midokura, network virtualization company that contributes to Apache CloudStack, agrees. "I don't believe it's the Foundation's responsibility to deal with the changing market and evolution of the projects," he says. "It's the responsibility of each project's community to adapt to the changing winds of technology and market pressure. As with every software project, sometimes there are lifespans associated with these projects, and death and rebirth are part of the normal lifecycle of software. There will be some projects that are wild successes and some that flounder. This isn't a failure of the Apache project. It's just a reality of how software is accepted and adopted by the market."
To that end, any project under Apache's sponsorship must realize on its own how to remain competitive and not let the sponsorship of the ASF suffice for that.
Project politics and its discontents
The ASF has taken heat of late based on how specific projects have been handled. Case in point: OpenOffice.org, which was
donated to the ASF by Oracle in June 2011.
Four months after OpenOffice.org changed hands, the ASF published a statement to quell fears about the future of the project and to forestall some criticism already thrown its way. The statement claimed "destructive statements have been published by both members of the greater FOSS community and former contributors to the original OpenOffice.org product, suggesting that the project has failed during the 18 weeks since its acceptance into the Apache Incubator. We understand that stakeholders of a project with a 10+-year history -- be they former product managers or casual users -- may be unfamiliar with the Apache Way and question its methods." Apache went on to cite the Subversion and SpamAssassin projects as "proof that the Apache Way works."
Some criticism might have been due to the way the change in ownership of OpenOffice.org apparently delayed the software's release schedule. A beta of version 3.4 had been offered in April 2011, but the full-blown 3.4 release wouldn't come out until May of the following year. (Version 4.0, with major code contributions from IBM, was released in July 2013.)
Part of the delay was due to relicensing the suite under the Apache license, a time-consuming process. But some of it was more directly attributable to OpenOffice.org, regardless of who sponsors it, having a release-when-ready approach rather than dropping new versions on any fixed schedule. By contrast, the OpenOffice.org sister project, LibreOffice, drops new releases every six months under the LGPL.
Another recent issue involved the retirement of one of the Foundation's smaller software projects, the Apache C++ Standard Library project. Active since 2005, this project had seen its last revision in mid-2008. The chair for the project, Jim Jagielski, stepped down at the end of May 2013; in July, the ASF board voted to retire the project to the Apache Attic, a space "to provide process and solutions to make it clear when an Apache project has reached its end of life."