The ASF is the first home that comes to mind when an successful open-source project needs independent stewardship. Often when a company wants to "spin off" an open source project, they turn to Apache.
What alternative organizations fill this need in a more lightweight fashion? Most other umbrella open source organizations I know of focus on copyleft and other issues that can be hostile to commercial interests.
Conservancy doesn't care about licenses as long as they are free. For example, jQuery (MIT license) is part of Conservancy.
Conservancy members include prominent projects such as Boost, BusyBox, Darcs, Git, Inkscape, jQuery, Mercurial, PyPy, Samba, Selenium, Squeak, uClibc, Wine.
Very cool. It seems like they are the type of organization Mikeal is encouraging ASF to become: legal and administrative support for open source projects, and other services if the project's leaders wish. Quite hands-off.
Comparing the lists of projects, I'm surprised to find I use more SFC software than ASF software.
"Conservancy doesn't care about licenses as long as they are free."
They do care about licenses and license terms are part of the requirements for application. The project license must be either free (per FSF) or open (per OSI). Docs must be made available under Creative Commons licenses. And the project must be completely non-profit. (All these requirements must be met.)
That being said, you're right, it's a good home without the politics discussed here.
What alternative organizations fill this need in a more lightweight fashion? Most other umbrella open source organizations I know of focus on copyleft and other issues that can be hostile to commercial interests.