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We've become spoiled.

open source has different levels ranging from "made in basement and released to the world" (one maintainer, patches welcome) to "throw over the fence" (you can see the code, but nobody cares about patches) to "we're an open source corporation" (apache, patches welcome if you follow steps 1 to 22).

Hadoop falls under apache governance which means jira, contributor license agreements, and spending a week of your life trying to get your point across. It's much easier to complain like the spoiled developers we've become.




It's much easier to complain like the spoiled developers we've become."

By your own comments, that's not really fair. The Apache project has become a disaster area of bureaucracy, crappy code and crappier documentation. You have to spend weeks in the muck to get to the point where you can even properly understand the deficiencies of any given Apache subproject, and by that point, you're so bound up in the project that it's hard to move away. From the build system of the code to the structure of the community, not a single thing about Apache is what I would characterize as nimble or lightweight. Can you blame people for feeling helpless?

It's gotten to the point where I'll look anywhere for a competing implementation of an idea before using Apache code to do something. It's just not worth the pain.


I feel exactly the same way about Apache projects, and even now it's very rare to meet a fellow traveler.

Years ago I had the same emperor has no clothes realization that the ASF was an enormous BureaucraticBullshitFactoryFactory — that it was seemingly founded just to host enterprise middleware crap while trading on the name of httpd (without really developing it of course).

It took quite a while before I realized that the Apache Software Foundation was just the new IBM — and not just figuratively, if you actually looked at the active membership of the ASF, it was chock full of IBM employees contributing on company time.




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