(IDG News Service) AOL LLC will phase out several online services as the Time Warner Inc. unit continues to struggle in its transition from a business model based on subscription fees to one based on advertising revenue.

AOL will put out to pasture Xdrive, a hosted-storage service for individuals; AOL Pictures, a photo sharing and management site; and Bluestring, designed for sharing photos, music and videos, according to an internal memo obtained by technology news site TechCrunch. In the memo, AOL Executive Vice President Kevin Conroy said these and mobile services AIM World and MyMobile will be "sunset" because they haven't gained enough popularity. A source close to AOL said the leaked memo is legitimate and that it was intended solely for Conroy's team.

AOL's popularity problem among end users and advertisers seems widespread, judging by the anemic growth AOL achieved in advertising revenues in the first quarter: 1%, when compared with the same quarter last year. AOL has been on a yearslong shift away from its traditional business, based on charging customers for dial-up Internet access service and for exclusive online content. It has been trying to move to a model based on online advertising, which has been experiencing strong growth in the past five years.

Today at the OSCON open source software convention, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) got an unexpected new sponsor: Microsoft. The Redmond software giant, which will contribute $100,000 annually to the ASF, joins Google and Yahoo as a platinum sponsor of Apache development.

The ASF is a nonprofit group that exerts loose organizational guidance role over a sprawling ecosystem of autonomously managed software projects, including the Apache web server and a host of libraries, frameworks, toolkits, and programs. The culture of the ASF is built upon what they call the "Apache Way," a philosophy of consensus-based collaborative stewardship and volunteerism.

I spoke with Apache Software Foundation (ASF) president Justin Erenkrantz, who views Microsoft's sponsorship of Apache as a step forward for interoperability. He believes that this move is based on a legitimate desire by Microsoft to foster collaborative development of Apache technologies that implement Microsoft standards. In particular, he points out an ASF project called Apache POI which offers native Java libraries for reading and writing Microsoft Office file formats.