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This move inspired the ire of one of the project's other contributors, Christian Bergström, who had previously volunteered to take over as project chair. He derided the board's choice as "a stupid decision made by bureaucrats" and claimed, "The project still has potential and the lack of vision and belief from the 'board' that those interested could actually achieve it -- it's flat out disappointing." (Bergström declined to comment for this article.)
Jagielski, when asked about Bergström's complaints, replied: "The Apache C++ Standard Library was given numerous opportunities to 'reboot' itself and re-energize the community, but the sad fact is that it was never able to accomplish it." He also noted that Bergström didn't take the right kind of initiative: "As the mailing list and code repo logs show, there was no activity of merit at all [in the project] for a long, long time, and Mr. Bergström certainly had plenty of opportunity to provide some evidence of that potential; even some code commits from him and others would have been a factor."
Brockmeier also points out that retiring a project to the Attic is not meant to be a death sentence. "Retiring projects is one of the reasons I like Apache's approach overall," he says. "Pushing a project into the Attic doesn't in any way hinder people using the code or reviving development at a later date."
Some Attic-bound projects have been moved into new directions. Apache Avalon, for instance, has since become a whole host of subprojects, some maintained by other entities (such as Loom). On the other hand, Apache Harmony, an open source implementation of Java, was sent to the Attic in 2011. (OpenJDK, an entirely separate project along the same lines started by Oracle, has more or less eclipsed Harmony's place.)
Apache Foundation governance is also little guard against ensuring the diversity of a project community. Apache Harmony was largely sponsored by IBM, and the project was Attic-bound when IBM left Harmony for OpenJDK -- possibly out of fear of being sued by Oracle. According to an article by Gavin Clarke of the Register, all this took place without IBM once consulting the ASF to help ease the transition.
“IBM,” Clarke wrote at the time, “is not under any actual obligation to consult the board [in such circumstances], under the rules of the ASF” -- a sign of how those rules need continued scrutiny and re-evaluation to be relevant -- and to ensure that a given project isn’t at the mercy of developers who represent another, single interest.
ASF and the future of open source
Open source software development is becoming increasingly split between two paths. Down one path lies the world of individually
bootstrapped, spontaneously collaborative efforts hosted on GitHub, usually with little formal backing but great enthusiasm
and vibrancy. Down the other is the world of commercially sponsored open source, a world the Apache Software Foundation is
heavily invested in, as OpenOffice.org, Hadoop, CloudStack, Tomcat, and several other projects show.