Apache Software Considered Useful

As the Apache Software Foundation gears up to celebrate 15 years of operations I just wanted to take the time to point out that Java’s renaissance has been underpinned and underwritten by the organisation, playing a huge part in the new and emerging Big Data ecosystems bringing together Enterprise and Web companies.

As a time when Oracle’s stewardship of Java was increasingly challenging, the ASF was a safe harbor for people building cool stuff in Java. Yes that’s right – cool stuff in Java.

Hadoop may now be too successful to be cool exactly, but Apache Giraph is (Facebook is using Giraph alongside Hadoop now). Or how about the real time stuff, contributions from LinkedIn and Twitter – Kafka and Storm?

Or the new coolness from Twitter, AirBnB, Mesosphere etc- Apache Mesos (an OS for the cloud, etc, turning machines into One Big Machine, doing for compute what Hadoop did for batch counting). Meanwhile Google’s Kubernetes platform, which is designed to fulfil similar goals, was also recently open sourced under an Apache license.

ASF is now the go to governance organisation for West Coast code, and the Web Companies there are building a ton of interesting stuff. Apache may seem boring and consensual but those are often virtues when creating standards.

So while it was trendy for a while to decry Java and the ASF, clearly they have plenty of runway ahead of them.

If you think Java is dead, then clearly you haven’t been paying attention.

Here is to another 15 years.

associated links – Happy Birthday Apache (10 years in)

disclosure: the ASF is currently not a client, but we’ve worked with the organisation for many years, and been advocates most of that time.