Can someone explain why Facebook moved this to Apache? When Wave died, it went to Apache. But Facebook moves Cassandra to Apache, and its still considered alive. Why do companies do this?
Speaking generally, companies aren't good at running community based open source projects -- their interests don't always align with what is best for an open source project.
When a project like Cassandra came to Apache, there were only a couple Facebook developers working on it -- and they had largely abandoned future work on it. After growing the community there are dozens of people today contributing patches from many independent companies -- this makes a much stronger product that will survive the whims of a single company, which is also what consumers of open source projects look for, a stable ecosystem that won't go away if X is bought by Oracle or another BigEvilCorporation.
It remains to be seen if Wave will build a big enough community to be successful inside the ASF, but Cassandra is certainly one of the success stories.
It makes it easier for others to contribute in a couple ways.
* Other companies can feel as though they have a say in the direction of the project, and they can more safely commit developer hours to it with less fear that their patches will get NAKed or similar.
* A lot of open-source developers are familiar with the ASF's ecosystem (web hosting, version control, bug tracking, mailing list).
* A company can use the project with less of a chance that the license will suddenly change, or the project will become closed-source, or similar shenanigans.
The notion of "dead" and "alive" you're using doesn't seem to pertain to whether development is still happening, it seems to refer to whether or not the company that happened to write the first version of the code happens to find it commercially useful enough to keep running the project. It seems reasonable that you could write something and not want to continue developing it, but realize it's useful and want to put it in capable hands to bring the project forward.
This is a huge and awesome milestone for the Cassandra project, and a big win for all its users. Congratulations all around for getting it out the door!
