Apparently, one of the big motivating reasons for this was "cost".<p>> The foundation’s 2018 five-year strategic plan noted that infrastructure services account for more than 80 percent of the total ASF expense budget, adding: “Increasingly, project communities have infrastructure requirements that strain the capabilities of the ASF.”<p>> The report noted that, given burgeoning costs, encouraging the use of more externally provided services was its best option. (“Using a simple growth forecast to project expenses and effective governance and mentoring to ensure that using externally provided services does not in any way present barriers to entry to projects or reduce transparency, inclusiveness and diversity.”)<p><a href="https://www.cbronline.com/news/apache-software-foundation-github" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbronline.com/news/apache-software-foundation-gi...</a><p>Given that I find ASF has always been very moral with their fundraising and careful with their money (unlike a couple other major non-profits I happily would name in any other context), as disappointed as I am with this decision, it is difficult for me to blame them for making it: git is extremely difficult to scale correctly (due to its reliance on interactive protocols), which led Google Code and then GitHub to rewrite large portions of it (of course, as closed source internal-only this-is-our-competitive-advantage projects); when you are a small non-profit, knowing that you would have 5x the resources for staffing if you just swapped out some mere tooling has got to be a really really tough choice for something that isn't quite your core moral (as it would be with say, the FSF).
I believe the ASF blog[1] to have a much better title: "The Apache® Software Foundation Expands Infrastructure with GitHub Integration"<p>"joins" sounds very wrong to me. Apache has had a Github account for years and the mirrors have existed for years as well.<p>The ASF still hosts their own Git repositories at <a href="https://gitbox.apache.org/" rel="nofollow">https://gitbox.apache.org/</a> In fact all ASF projects needed to migrate from the old git-wip to gitbox just recently (December 2018) [2] and in that announcement they said: "When your project has moved, you are free to use either the ASF repository system (gitbox.apache.org) OR GitHub for your development and code pushes"<p>So I believe the ASF still hosts a fully up-to-date git repository for each of their projects that use git. It's just that the integration has gotten much better between ASF infrastructure (e.g. Jira) and Github.<p>[1] <<a href="https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-software-foundation-expands>" rel="nofollow">https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-softwar...</a>
[2] <<a href="https://blogs.apache.org/infra/entry/relocation-of-apache-git-repositories>" rel="nofollow">https://blogs.apache.org/infra/entry/relocation-of-apache-gi...</a>
Important clarifications:
- The announcement is only about technology, there's no "partnership" between the ASF and GitHub. The ASF is vendor-neutral about all of it's operations. In particular, there is an expectation that Apache project communities continue to do much of their community and release management on ASF servers, not solely on GitHub.
- Many Apache projects asked to use GitHub. It took a while, but Apache infra now allows that, as long as the repos are in our organization. Many projects still use our Subversion repo(s) too.
- The ASF hosts it's own Git repos with all auditable history. So GitHub is merely one way that Apache projects can <i>choose</i> to allow users to contribute. If GitHub went away overnight, the ASF would still have all our own code and could keep working with our own build tools and plain old `git`. The ASF didn't decommission it's own git repos, just some of the tooling we used to mirror between our repos and GitHub.<p>Lars elsethread brought up a useful ASF blog post:
<a href="https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-software-foundation-expands" rel="nofollow">https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-softwar...</a><p>And yes, <a href="https://github.com/apache" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/apache</a> is the ASF.
It confuses me why so many traditionally pro-FOSS projects move to a not-free-nor-open tool like GitHub. Do they think that they’ll get enough new contributors this way to offset the (more than slight) irony?
I guess GitHub right now is like Facebook was in 2012, everybody is on it, it's a super vibrant community, it's backed by a huge amount of money, it locks you in (at least with wiki, issues, URLs).<p>And a second guess is that it will also do what Facebook does, getting out of control by trying to monetize on its monopoly.<p>It's just so mega ironic that the whole Open Source movement collectively decided that for a little bit of convenience they're more than OK to let Microsoft host their stuff and to sacrifice so much freedom (and especially the URL which does the lock-in to GitHub).
I didn't find any link to their GitHub profile in the blogs or press releases:<p><a href="https://github.com/apache/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/apache/</a>
In 2009, I brought the idea of using github up on the members@ list and was called a troll. Agreed, at the time, the message was trolling...<p><a href="https://imgur.com/a/JPQtCQ4" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/JPQtCQ4</a><p>I brought it up again later in 2010 and 2011 on the members@ list too. Lots of discussion with the general consensus that it wouldn't happen because it isn't an 'open' platform.<p>I even wrote a blog post about it in 2011, which was also discussed on members@ and in the blog comments...<p><a href="http://lookfirst.com/2011/11/contributing-to-open-source.html" rel="nofollow">http://lookfirst.com/2011/11/contributing-to-open-source.htm...</a><p>Even though it took 10 years, I'm glad to see it finally happen.
For many years now, it's felt like Apache software foundation is where projects go to die.<p>It's a shame its taken so long, but I'm glad to see this news - it's pretty much guaranteed to increase participation in Apache projects.
From the ASF press release:<p>> In February 2019, the migration to GitHub was complete, and the ASF's own git service was decommissioned.<p>I'm confused. <a href="https://git.apache.org/" rel="nofollow">https://git.apache.org/</a> doesn't look decommissioned.
I am quite happy about it. There are large number of very useful libraries and infrastructure projects (along with J2EE inspired frameworks which I have decided to ignore) which remain essential for Java related software development.
So... I guess this April fool's Jira from a few year's ago might actually come to fruition?<p><a href="https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524" rel="nofollow">https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524</a>
When i see a person solve a problem with a Github repo, the first thing i try to know is that: What's the problem he's trying to solve.<p>Then i ask myself: OK, the problem is real, but what about generalizing it ?<p>Tons of OSS projects focus more on generalizing solutions, not problems. And it's the problem with OSS.
I found this title very confusing. I thought it was the equivalent of their non-profit being absorbed by GitHub. Meaning, the corporate structure."<p>Why don't they just say that Apache will officially host their repositories on GitHub moving forward?
And the 3 dozen GitHub to Gitlab migrants are trying to find ways to come back while still saving face.<p>I have personally seen people who, for example, not only use powershell (on Linux of all places) but also build tooling around it and file issues on the GitHub repo. The same people left GitHub when MS acquired it.
So the "Open Apache Graveyard" is moving to github, for better visibility, interaction, and where the users are.<p>Thats a good move.
Although most of the software from the "Open Apache Graveyard" like OpenOffice and others is kinda dead already.<p>Just my very biased IMHO.