In a blog post , the Apache Software Foundation announced that it is joining the GitHub open source community.
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is a non-profit organization that develops open source software under the Apache license , bringing together developers, managers, and volunteer incubators from more than 350 open source projects and initiatives.
Apache is a large open source code base, with over 200 million lines of code managed by a volunteer community of 730 members and 7000 code contributors.
In its 20 years of existence, XNUMX billion lines of code have been validated in more than three million changes.
Infrastructure integrates with GitHub
In its blog, ASF explains that Apache projects initially had two version control services available through the ASF infrastructure: Apache Subversion and Git.
Over the years, a growing number of projects and their communities have wanted their source code to be available on GitHub.
For read-only mirror projects, the ability to use GitHub tools in these repositories was limited.
In 2016, the Foundation began integrating the GitHub repository and tools into its own services. This allowed selected projects to use GitHub's excellent tools.
Over time, we've improved, refined, and solidified this integration. At the end of 2018, we asked all projects to move away from our internal Git service, in favor of the one provided by GitHub.
This change brought all the tools to the projects, while maintaining a backup copy of our infrastructure. Said Greg Stein, Infrastructure Manager at ASF.
In their statement they share the following:
“We are working with Apache to meet your needs and better support important open source projects. We are grateful for such a powerful foundation to migrate and develop directly on GitHub. Once this transition is complete, Apache can focus on building software and its community.
Whether we work with administrators and individual open source contributors at some of the largest open source foundations in the world, such as Apache, GitHub's mission is to be home to all developers by supporting open source communities, responding meeting your unique needs and helping open source projects flourish, "said Bryan Clark, product manager for open source maintainers at GitHub.
“GitHub makes it easier for developers to work together, solve complex problems, and create the world's most important technologies. The platform enables teams to host and review code, manage projects, and create software alongside developers of more than 31 million users, companies, and organizations with more than 2 million. users, and more than 100 million repositories', reads the blog post.
By integrating with GitHub, ASF projects will be hosted on a single platform where the 31 million developers who use GitHub worldwide can review and collaborate on them, GitHub explained.
Now that the transition is complete, ASF can focus its efforts on developing software and the community.
“We have been working with Apache to meet their needs and to better support open source projects that do important work. "We are grateful that such an impressive foundation is migrating and growing directly on GitHub," GitHub wrote in a post.
This news hasn't pleased the developer community, as opinions are mixed . For some, an open-source community migrating to GitHub, which isn't free and open source, is perplexing.
They wonder if ASF is thinking of finding more taxpayers in this way. For others, it is obvious that ASF will have more contributors because many more people know how to use the GitHub tools.
And that will probably increase the amount of development, participation, attraction demands, etc. ASF projects receive.
For them, it is clear that this migration will be beneficial for the ASF, regardless of whether the GitHub platform is open source or not.
Source: https://blogs.apache.org