The Apache Software Foundation Board of Directors Meeting Agenda March 17, 2004 1. Call to order The meeting was scheduled for 10:00 PST -0800 and was begun at 10:03 when a quorum was recognized by the chairman. The meeting was held by teleconference, hosted by Greg Stein and CollabNet: IRC #asfboard on irc.freenode.net was used for backup purposes. 2. Roll Call Directors Present: Brian Behlendorf Ken Coar Mark Cox Dirk-Willem van Gulik Jim Jagielski Ben Laurie Sam Ruby Greg Stein Sander Striker Directors Absent: none Guests: Chuck Murcko (Treasurer) 3. Minutes and supplements from previous meetings A. The meeting of November 16, 2003 Minutes are not yet available for approval. [Brian Behlendorf] B. The meeting of January 21, 2004 CVS - board/board_minutes_2004_01_21.txt Approved by General Consent. C. The meeting of February 18, 2004 Minutes are not yet available for approval. [Jim Jagielski] 4. Officer Reports A. Chairman [Greg] A lot of progress has been made on the legal front. We have switched over to the new 2.0 license, and we've greatly increased our CLA coverage. There has also been a lot of discussion over the past month regarding copyrights, author tags, and licensing (and incorporating non-ASF code). With all of this, it might be time to sit back and take a breath. B. President [Dirk] Infrastructure Two new root people have signed up to help out: Noel Bergman and Erik Abele. This lightens the load on the current roots and the rotation. More efforts are ongoing to automate root tasks. Part of the new hardware as arrived at Sam's. The new HP server has seen final approval and should be arriving in the Netherlands somewhere in the upcoming weeks. A three CPU Xeon machine is sitting at Brians waiting to be moved to the colo. There is still no news from APC with respect to the UPS. Given the power incidents over past period, action on this issue is suggested for consideration. Subversion was upgraded to 1.0.1. Forrest has moved to SVN, its CVS history converted. More projects are expected to move over. Projects already using SVN are happy with it. Steadily more projects are using the new wiki installation. The UseMod wiki is still not frozen and the migration from there is not definitive yet due to time constraints of contributors (Leo Simons, who is handling most of the wiki related things, in particular). The Cocoon wiki and the SpamAssassin wiki are in the process of migration. A few instances of 'Wiki spamming' have occurred, and were dealt with in under 24h. Furthermore the configuration was updated to be more restrictive in what is published (like usage statistics). The obtainment of insurance for the European colo was discussed. The general consent was that the insurance provided no protection to the ASF and therefore should not be purchased. C. Treasurer [Chuck] Address mixup with Dirk has been corrected. No new info on EFT payment for United Layer. Corporation fee bill received from Jim and paid. Accountant balance paid. Lock box services with Wells Fargo for contributions is now being pursued, since we have a bank VP here, finally. Sign up process for car donations with two companies is in progress. Current balances (as of 01/21/2004): Paypal $2356.51 Checking $234.82 Premium Mkt. $103104.96 D. Exec. V.P. and Secretary [Jim] After almost daily updates to the CLA listing, due to the March 1 deadline before accounts were closed, we are back to weekly updates. Our annual CSC renewal was received and fowarded to Chuck for payment. Jim is requesting a monthly office budget of $100 to cover such expenses as paper, postage and inkjet ink. Jim also noted that the ASF office received notice that, due to the Sun vs. Microsoft trial, that Microsoft has requested "confidential" documents which may exist between Sun and other entities, including the ASF. The notice states that any documents provided will be marked as "highly confidential" and that serious restrains are placed on Microsoft over their allowed use of these documents. 5. Special Orders A. Establish Apache Struts PMC WHEREAS, the Board of Directors deems it to be in the best interests of the Foundation and consistent with the Foundation's purpose to establish a Project Management Committee charged with the creation and maintenance of open-source software related to the Apache Struts framework, for distribution at no charge to the public. NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that a Project Management Committee (PMC), to be known as the "Apache Struts PMC", be and hereby is established pursuant to Bylaws of the Foundation; and be it further RESOLVED, that the Apache Struts PMC be and hereby is responsible for the creation and maintenance of software for Apache Struts and for related software components, based on software licensed to the Foundation; and be it further RESOLVED, that the office of "Vice President, Apache Struts" be and hereby is created, the person holding such office to serve at the direction of the Board of Directors as the chair of the Apache Struts PMC, and to have primary responsibility for management of the projects within the scope of responsibility of the Apache Struts PMC; and be it further RESOLVED, that the persons listed immediately below be and hereby are appointed to serve as the initial members of the Apache Struts PMC: Craig R. McClanahan Ted Husted Rob Leland Cedric Dumoulin Martin Cooper Arron Bates James Holmes David M. Karr David Graham James Mitchell Steve Raeburn Don Brown Joe Germuska NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Craig R. McClanahan be and hereby is appointed to the office of Vice President, Apache Struts, to serve in accordance with and subject to the direction of the Board of Directors and the Bylaws of the Foundation until death, resignation, retirement, removal or disqualification, or until a successor is appointed; and be it further RESOLVED, that the initial Apache Struts PMC be and hereby is tasked with the creation of a set of bylaws intended to encourage open development and increased participation of the Apache Struts Project, in the Java language as well as others, and be it further RESOLVED, that the initial Apache Struts PMC be and hereby is tasked with the migration and rationalization of the Jakarta PMC Struts subproject, and be it further RESOLVED, that all responsibility pertaining to the Jakarta Struts sub-project and encumbered upon the Jakarta PMC are hereafter discharged. Approved by Unanimous Vote. 6. Discussion Items A. Discussion: Policy for Third-Party Code in Apache Releases There has been too much confusion over what may be included in a source code or binary distribution of an Apache release from apache.org. Below is a proposed policy to be publicly posted to address this confusion. The board would also need to set a date for conformance to this policy. 1. If anything is unclear or in doubt, bring your questions to licensing@apache.org. Better to ask early than late or never. 2. Source distributions must be under the terms of the Apache License. Source distributions may include third-party software under other licenses, but those licenses must not place requirements or restrictions on the code, even those subsets of code, that go beyond those of the Apache license. 3. Binary distributions may include third-party libraries that allow for redistribution in combination with code under the Apache License. The existance of any library whose copyright terms go beyond that of the Apache License *must* be prominently mentioned in the LICENSE file accompaning the binary distribution (appended after the Apache License), and all requirements of the licenses of the third party code must be followed with respect to attribution, labelling, et cetera. 4. It is the responsibility of all developers to be aware of the licenses on included code, to follow those requirements, and make those requirements clear to the recipients of their code. The board approved the above "talking points" regarding third-party code in Apache releases. Notice will be sent to members@. B. Set a date for the annual Members meeting (in May) May 18th was sent for the date of the Annual ASF Members Meeting, to be held via irc. 7. Committee Reports A. Apache APR Project [Cliff Woolley] See Attachment A Approved by General Consent. B. Apache Avalon Project [J. Aaron Farr] See Attachment B Approved by General Consent. C. Apache Commons Project [Justin Erenkrantz] See Attachment C Approved by General Consent. D. Apache Gump Project [Stefan Bodewig] See Attachment D Approved by General Consent. E. Apache Jakarta Project [Geir Magnussen Jr] See Attachment E Approved by General Consent. F. Apache Portals Project [Santiago Gala] See Attachment F Approved by General Consent. G. Apache Web Services Project [Davanum Srinivas] See Attachment G Approved by General Consent. 8. Unfinished Business 9. New Business Discussion of implications of Sarbanes-Oxley Act on ASF financial structure and responsibilities Chuck reported that this act could have substantial effect on the current running of the ASF regarding fundraising and accounting. Chuck noted that having an independent audit of the ASF books would be in keeping with the act. He also noted that having the ASF Treasurer also act on the fund- raising team should be discouraged. Greg said that he would look into some people to do the independent audit. 10. Announcements 11. Adjournment Scheduled to adjourn by 11:30 PST -0800. Adjourned at 11:10. ============ ATTACHMENTS: ============ ----------------------------------------- Attachment A: Status report for the Apache APR Project A few things to report in the APR project this quarter. First, by popular demand we are releasing an 0.9.5 release (the T&R process is ongoing as of the time of this writing). At the same time, we are splitting HEAD into an APR_1_0 branch (as we reported we would in our last report). We had originally done this at ApacheCon but then backed it out for short-term convenience... we probably should have just left it in as a forcing function. Oh well. That brings up the second and more important point, however, which is that we've had trouble lately with new contributors to our project finding more and more frequently that their submissions (by way of email) go unanswered. No one has the time. We recognize this as more of a social problem than a technical one, but it's one that we're seeking both social and technical solutions for. Several suggestions have been made on the PMC mailing list, and we will be following up on them. We'll keep the board up-to-date on whatever corrective action we take -- surely this problem is not unique to our project. No new sub-projects this quarter. No *new* committers or PMC members this quarter, though we did welcome back Ryan Bloom as a re-activated (no longer emeritus) committer. ----------------------------------------- Attachment B: Status report for the Apache Avalon Project Highlights of Events from mid-February ====================================== * Locked Accounts and CLA's -- Avalon has committer accounts locked due to missing CLA's. Some of these individuals have expressed a desire to have the account closed. The impact of removing their contributions if no CLA can be obtained would be negligable to the Avalon project. We, the PMC, are looking to the board on any guidelines for action on these locked accounts -- at what point should we freeze code? At what point (if any) should we consider closing these accounts? * The ASL 2.0 License has been applied to our source code. We still need to apply the license to all our other documentation. * PMC Membership -- Leo Simons has stepped down from the Avalon PMC. Both he and Berin Loritsch need removed from the committee-info.txt file. Still looking for an ACK. * Avalon Mission Discussions -- There has been much discussion on the Avalon mailing lists about our mission and roadmap for the future. While this has been a hotly debated topic at times, I believe we are moving forward and building a solid consensus. A recent vote by the community confirms our direction as a single project with a single architecture. See below for email thread references. * Releases: Fortress 1.1 and Excalibur Components Released. This release was made at the request of the Cocoon community. * New committer: Timothy Bennett Plans for Next Quarter ====================== No significant changes from plans reported last month. A lot of work will be on consolidating our Avalon containers and working out support for our users during this process. Avalon Mission Discussions (sampling) ========================== [1] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=107832888500006&r=1&w=2 [2] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=107850438000003&r=1&w=2 [3] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=107890943900004&r=1&w=2 [4] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=107906872800002&r=1&w=2 ----------------------------------------- Attachment C: Status report for the Apache Commons Project Well, there's been *nothing* happening in Commons since the last report. That's partly because my last board report set off yet another discussion about the relationship between Jakarta Commons and Apache Commons. Once again, nothing happened subsequently. However, there was a spike in discussion over in Jakarta Commons dev list. The other component in the slowdown is that the developers involved with serf (still the only codebase that the PMC oversees) haven't had a lot of time to dedicate to it (following a rather intense quarter of activity though!). I'm frankly at a loss as to what we should do with this project. I strongly believe that the ASF *does* need a place to store small, reusable components. However, I believe that the current situation isn't conducive to the project's growth and I'm not sure what we can do to repair it. ----------------------------------------- Attachment D: Status report for the Apache Gump Project Most of the past few weeks has been filled with infrastructure stuff. We've successfully migrated web-site, CVS module, bug-tracking and the mailing list to gump.apache.org - many thanks to the infrastructure team for making the transition that smooth. All Apache committers have been Gump committers with the old setup and this still remains true. We want to get as many people involved as possible when it gets to maintaining the project metadata. This is the reason that we've been sticking to CVS for now since we can reach most Apache committers that way. Gump will probably be one of the last projects that make the transition to Subversion. Work on the project bylaws has started and we expect to have them ready for the next board meeting. Gump is unique when it comes to committer status so we'll have to put some thoughts into the definition of that role. Gump has been quite successful in pointing out problems in some builds recently and we are happy that most of them have been resolved between projects easily. Our biggest problem right now is building Avalon, but this may be due to the fact that Gump is using a different build system than Avalon more than anything else. Once Gump supports Maven as a build option, things may become easier for Avalon. We continue improving the Python rewrite of Gump and have come quite a long way already. Since nobody of us is anywhere near a Python guru, we may be doing things far more complicated than necessary. Any help is welcome. 8-) The short-to-mid-term future steps for Gump are * get dedicated ASF hardware to run Gump on - [currently working on getting it running on Moof but we are really looking forward to the new gump-dedicated machine]. * expand Gump's reach beyond building Java projects. * improve the way Gump works by trying to find an computationally feasible way to nagging the offender and not the offended, improve the usability/effectiveness of gump reports, find ways to increase adoption by making social pressure of nagging more effective and ease the effort required for users to update their project descriptors. * start thinking on how to provide feedback for legal dependencies checkings ----------------------------------------- Attachment E: Status report for the Apache Jakarta Project The Jakarta community would like to mention an official thanks and warm and heartfelt appreciation to our outgoing chair, Sam Ruby. We recognize that he was instrumental in guiding it through a sometimes difficult period of high growth, and we all value his considerate and thoughtful contributions. Jakarta Project Report - March 2004 ----------------------------------- * As the board is obviously aware, the Jakarta PMC has changed chairs, with the retirement :) of Sam Ruby and the appointment of Geir Magnusson Jr. * We officially added 37 committers to the Jakarta PMC. These additions were from the previous two months, and we are starting the process of identifying new candidates and voting again. * We feel we had a successful transition to the new Apache Software License v2.0 The entire Jakarta Commons and commons sandbox has been converted, and the community is very aware of the need to ensure that both the spirit and letter of the boards instructions regarding the license are followed. Thanks to all at the ASF for help in clearing up our questions regarding the process. * The HiveMind codebase currently located in Jakarta Commons has completed it's software grant from WebCT, the employer of the primary author, and the Jakarta PMC has approved a proposal to make HiveMind a new Jakarta sub-project. Along with the PMC's support, the community response to the proposal was very positive. We have checked with the Incubator PMC, and there have been no other issues raised preventing this from happening. * The Jakarta Struts sub-project has voted to apply for ASF top-level project status. The Jakarta PMC supports this and urges the board to accept their proposal ASAP. * The HttpClient component of Jakarta Commons has voted to apply for Jakarta sub-project status. We are waiting the formal proposal, and don't foresee any problems. * We recognize that our charter is woefully inadequate, and intend to produce a revision to submit for board approval in the near future. * The Jakarta PMC had a long and sometimes heated discussion about the board's recommendation that author tags be removed from code. I think that we collectively understand the motivation and how a community has to be careful that author tags don't lead to territorial ownership of what is community-owned code. However, I urge that the board do not mandate their removal, allowing the individual communities to police themselves on this issue. Many of us, myself included, value the author tags because we recognize that it's human nature to be proud of one's work, and the author tag is [one] way in which new community members can initially find value in contribution. Finally, we would appreciate some clarification on how removal of the tags changes the legal exposure of the committers or the ASF. I, for one, don't grok the legal argument. ----------------------------------------- Attachment F: Status report for the Apache Portals Project The Portals project infrastructure setup has proceeded rather slowly, due to most involved people being buried in their dayjobs and having little time and energy remaining. We all expect that during March we can have all infrastructure issues solved and start offering a "visible" website, lists and repositories. * The pmc@portals.apache.org and general@portals.apache.org mailing lists were setup. It was agreed to keep separate -dev lists for the different modules, instead of merging them together into a unique -dev list. * The Portals PMC agreed to accept the Pluto codebase in the Apache Portals project. This vote was held (incorrectly) in the pmc list, and will be repeated in the public general list once this list has been publicized. * David Taylor will use Maven to generate the web site, and he is contacting people who can help to design a logo for the Portals effort. * Pluto is currently in the process of preparing the first release - Carsten Ziegeler has taken over the task of the release manager and it seems that the team will have finished all open tasks in early April. * Santiago Gala will ask for a graduation vote of pluto out of the incubator and into the portals project, and follow up whatever needs to be done to successfully graduate pluto. ----------------------------------------- Attachment G: Status report for the Apache Web Services Project * JaxMe has graduated from Incubator. * jUDDI is in the process of graduation. * Teething (infrastructure/processes) issue releasing SNAPSHOT and and releases of ws projects to ASF java repository. We are still finalizing the procedure. * All projects now use JIRA instead of Bugzilla. * Apache Axis and WS-FX projects are now under ASLv2. Others will follow. * Can the board please "issue" a "memo/procedure" to all the PMC's regarding how to review 3rd party software. Need summary as there were way too many emails on the subject. ------------------------------------------------------ End of minutes for the March 17, 2004 board meeting.