The Apache Foundation doesn't produce the software, people paid by various companies do. This is quite similar to the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation relationship.
Who would employ people to work on Firefox if the corp side shuts down eg. because they lose their revenue?
It's hit or miss. Many Apache projects are basically open source abandonware. It's great that there's an organization to manage the rights to these projects but Apache doesn't have much power to keep them going.
That’s a good point and I agree. But it’s not like they detract from the other products. I think for open source foundations it’s not about average product value but overall value of the portfolio.
If these were business lines then of course it’s bad to have stinkers or abandoned products. But with Apache products it doesn’t cost them anything (or almost nothing) to keep them around and have amazing products (httpd, spark, lucene, etc) ad well.
I think the issue with Mozilla is that their browser has really floundered despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars on development. That’s the problem they need to fix. It would be curious to see what Google’s spend is on Chromium and Chrome. I’d be surprised if they have 100 developers working on it.
You don’t have to pay $100M in developer salaries to produce great software. Mozilla is not that great despite having lots and lots of employees.
Perhaps rethinking their approach would be useful. But if their revenue goes away, it doesn’t mean Mozilla the browser goes away.
Maybe Mozilla should just be a governance process rather than a software developer. The browser would probably have similar quality.