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Why Apache Extras?

Published on Wednesday, Dec 15, 2010 by rgardler

This is historical content, not relevant anymore but kept here as an archive.

All Apache projects use the same pragmatic software license, the Apache License v2. However, we recognise that there are other FOSS licences out there, some of which are incompatible with the Apache License v2.

Code under these licenses cannot be hosted on Apache servers, but people sometimes choose to, or are required to, use them.

Until the launch of apache-extras these projects had no a single home to go to. They were spread across all of the various hosting platforms. This made it difficult for communities to cluster around related technologies. For us this was a problem since we believe strong collaborative communities are the key to successful open source software.

Apache Extras provides these projects with a way to clearly signal their relationship to one or more Apache project community. This will help them attract developer communities to their own projects.