Hi Bertil, Thanks for the clear summary. I fully support the idea to retire Baremaps from the incubator. It feels like the right move given the current momentum and the challenges around the release process.
The project still has real value. It’s great to see it used in production and that people are building around it. Moving back to the original GitHub org sounds like a clean and practical way to keep it alive and evolving more freely. Thanks again to you and everyone who put energy into the incubation. Hope the project keeps growing in its next phase! I also hope to finally have some more projects that I can build with baremaps. Cheers, Andrea On Wed, Jan 28, 2026 at 11:59 AM Bertil Chapuis <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello Everyone, > > As mentioned in the december report, I would like to propose the > retirement of the Apache Baremaps from the incubator. > > Activity on the project has slowed down. The main challenges we faced > during incubation were the rewriting of GPL dependencies and a slow release > process. We managed to address these issues, but it took most of our > attention and a toll on the development of new features. Lately, we have > been unable to gather votes in a reasonable time, which has probably slowed > our progress and motivation to contribute. > > This proposal concerns the retirement of the podling community, not the > code itself. Baremaps is used in production. To my knowledge, there are > deployment in collectivities, and the community keeps building tools around > it, such as a recent fast exporter written in Go by FlightAware [1]. > > If the community agrees, I propose to follow the standard retirement > process [2] with one request. I would like to explore with INFRA the > possibility to transfer rather than fork the repository back to the > original baremaps organization on GitHub [3]. A copy would remain in the > Apache organization for the archives. We would remove all Apache references > before making new releases outside the ASF. > > A lighter process outside of the incubator may help speed up releases. If > the project gains momentum again, we may consider coming back to the > Incubator later. The values of the ASF are probably more important than > ever to build sustainable open source software and healthy communities. > > Please share your thoughts. In my understanding, we should discuss and > vote here on the dev list before bringing a formal vote to the IPMC on > incubator mailing list. > > Thank you all for your contributions during incubation. > > Best regards, > > Bertil Chapuis > > [1] https://github.com/flightaware/baremaps-exporter > [2] https://incubator.apache.org/guides/retirement.html > [3] https://github.com/baremaps > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] > For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] > >
