This post represents the author’s opinion alone, and not any other organization, project or company.

Submitting text files via a form to update an Apache software project is the modern-day technology equivalent of medieval doctors bleeding patients while administering laxatives to cure Cholera.

And yet that is the process of updating the open-source infrastructure driving the data revolution. Compared to the simplicity of github pull requests, using a JIRA web form to submit text patches against a monolithic subversion database is extremely difficult. Not 10x difficult. Closer to 100x difficult for new, would-be contributors.

The result is that a very high bar is set for contributors. Which is anti-community. And since open source relies on community… it is anti-open source.

We live in a post-github world. Git enabled social coding, and it is past time that Apache caught up.