Apache Blog

From https://blogs.apache.org/couchdb/entry/welcome_bigcouch via http://blogs.apache.org/couchdb/

THURSDAY JUL 25, 2013
Welcome BigCouch

Good news! Cloudant has announced the completion of the BigCouch merge. This is a huge step forward for CouchDB. So thank you to Cloudant, and thank you to the committers (particularly Robert Newson and Paul Davis) who slogged (and travelled the world to pair with each other) to make this happen.

What does this mean? Well, right now, the code is merged, but not released. So hold your clicks just a moment! Once the code has been tested, we will include it in one of our regular releases. (If you want to help us test, hop on to the dev@ mailing list!)

What’s new? The key accomplishment of the merged code is that BigCouch’s clustering capability, along with the rest of Cloudant’s other enhancements to CouchDB’s code base, will now be available in Apache CouchDB. This also includes improvements in compaction and replication speed, as well as boosts for high-concurrency access performance.

Painless replication has always been CouchDB's biggest feature. Now we get to take advantage of Cloudant’s experience running large distributed clusters in production for four years. With BigCouch merged in, CouchDB will be able to replicate data at a much larger scale.

But wait! That’s not all! Cloudant has decided to terminate their BigCouch fork of CouchDB, and instead focus future development on Apache CouchDB. This is excellent news for CouchDB, even…

If engineers are the most important resource, I think being a company known for open source might act as an inbound sales for attracting top talent, too (see: Google, RedHat, Mozilla).

For engineers, it makes sense to work for companies that do have FOSS projects because they can always point to their corpus of work when switching between jobs as proof of their worth. Most engineers who realise this don't ever want to go back to working full time on closed source projects.

That said, folks making arguments against open source companies conveniently ignore the examples of Cloudera, Linaro, Hortonworks. They also tend to forget how much central open source is in the current climate because someone or the other will attempt to commoditize your core (Firebase vs Supabase, GitHub vs GitLab, Oracle vs Postgres, Docker vs Mesos, Windows vs Linux, Intel/AMD vs ARM, S3 vs MinIO, Symbian/iOS vs Android, Plaid vs Moov.io) and because of the Interwebs, these FOSS solutions will be found and a community will develop around it. It is almost inevitable.

I'm not an investor, but one should definitely invest in FOSS companies with proven tech because they attract the most precious commodity of all, developer mindshare. I'm sure FOSS companies will discover newer ways to make their businesses work (like GitLab and HashiCorp with "buyer-based open core"), and blueprints from the past are already available (especially, in terms of what not to do; looking at you, Docker). Despite what they…

The Apache team was nice enough to be pro-active and send me an email alert:

You are receiving this email because you have a login, '...', on the Apache JIRA installation, https://issues.apache.org/jira/

On April 6 the issues.apache.org server was hacked. The attackers were able to install a trojan JIRA login screen and later get full root access:

https://blogs.apache.org/infra/entry/apache_org_04_09_2010

We are assuming that the attackers have a copy of the JIRA database, which includes a hash (SHA-512 unsalted) of the password
you set when signing up as '...' to JIRA. If the password you set was not of great quality (eg. based on a dictionary word), it
should be assumed that the attackers can guess your password from the password hash via brute force.

The upshot is that someone malicious may know both your email address and a password of yours.

This is a problem because many people reuse passwords across online services. If you reuse passwords across systems, we urge you to change
your passwords on ALL SYSTEMS that might be using the compromised JIRA password. Prime examples might be gmail or hotmail accounts, online
banking sites, or sites known to be related to your email's domain, gmail.com.

I did not know that Android's 'stuck at Java 6' situation was due to the Apache Harmony project-Oracle scuffle.

Statement by the ASF Board on our participation in the Java Community Process:

> Through the JSPA, the agreement under which both Oracle and the ASF participate in the JCP, the ASF has been entitled to a license for the test kit for Java SE (the "TCK") that will allow the ASF to test and distribute a release of the Apache Harmony project under the Apache License. Oracle is violating their contractual obligation as set forth under the rules of the JCP by only offering a TCK license that imposes additional terms and conditions that are not compatible with open source or Free software licenses. The ASF believes that any specification lead that doesn't follow the JCP rules should not be able to participate as a member in good standing, and we have exercised our votes on JSRs -- our only real power on the JCP -- accordingly. We have voted against Sun starting and continuing JSRs, and have made it clear that we would vote against the JSR for Java SE 7 for these reasons. https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/statement_by_the_asf_board1

Note that IBM dumped Harmony in favor of OpenJDK last year after realizing Harmony will never get a TCK license from Sun/Oracle. The Apache Foundation resigned from the JCP Executive Committee in protest shortly after that and last year an open vote was taken within the Project Management Committee, which resulted in a 20-2 majority to discontinue development."

Here's what the Apache Foundation had to say:

when the Apache Foundation resigned from the JCP Executive Committee in protest, it actually stated on the organization's official blog that the "Java specifications are proprietary technology that must be licensed directly from the spec lead under whatever terms the spec lead chooses."

Source:
http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/04/oracle-asks-court-to-clear-up-potential.html

https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the_asf_resigns_from_the

Reddit's initial problems were from being woefully underprovisioned, which they acknowledged.

Here's what David King [ketralnis] said six months later: "Running any large website is a constant race between scaling your user base and scaling your infrastructure to support it," said David King, Lead Developer at Reddit. "Our traffic more than tripled this year, and the transparent scalability afforded to us by Apache Cassandra is in large part what allowed us to do it on our limited resources. Cassandra v0.7 represents the real-life operations lessons learned from installations like ours and provides further features like column expiration that allow us to scale even more of our infrastructure."

[https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the_apache_software_foundation_announces9]