The Apache Software Foundation Board of Directors Meeting Agenda December 15, 2004 1. Call to order The meeting was scheduled for 10:00 PST -0800 and was begun at 10:06 when a sufficient attendance to constitute a quorum was recognized by the chairman. The meeting was held teleconference, hosted by Ken Coar and IBM. IRC #asfboard on irc.freenode.net was used for backup purposes. 2. Roll Call Directors Present: Brian Behlendorf (arrived 10:13) Ken Coar Jim Jagielski Geir Magnusson Jr. Stefano Mazzocchi Sam Ruby Greg Stein Sander Striker Directors Absent: Dirk-Willem van Gulik Guests: Chuck Murcko (Treasurer) Davanum Srinivas 3. Minutes from previous meetings A. The meeting of October 20, 2004 CVS - board/board_minutes_2004_10_20.txt Approval of minutes board/board_minutes_2004_10_20.txt were tabled. B. The meeting of November 14, 2004 CVS - board/board_minutes_2004_11_14.txt [not yet available] 4. Officer Reports A. Chairman [Greg] Greg reported that, in general, things were "quiet" regarding the ASF with no problems or issues. He did note that there has been discussions regarding LGPL, and how it interacts and affects ASF projects, the Apache License and how it is interpreted within Java usage. B. President [Dirk] No report. C. Treasurer [Chuck] Lockbox services are still being pursued with WF. I received electronic copies of the signup documents and contracts, and submitted several questions, for which I have not received a response yet. The ASF received a $10,000 contribution from Omidyar Network Foundation. This is the second largest contribution received thus far, surpassng the $5,000 contribution received last December from Craig's List, and second only to the contribution by Siemens several years ago. We also received $2,000 from Somix Technologies and $1,000 from Mirra. I received the $25,000 check from Security Travel (from Ken), deposited it, and it was returned by WF NSF. After several contacts with Tina Greene and officers of both WF and Gilmore Banks, ASF received a wire transfer for $15,000 on 12/14, with an additional transfer for $10,000 scheduled for 12/17. I plan to monitor this closely to be sure it succeeds. After consultation with the PRC/Fundraising Committee, we have decided to terminate our contract with Jinx Hackware for ASF swag. No money has yet been received on this contract. A 60 notice of termination has been sent via Certified Mail, and a copy of the letter will be committed to /foundation. Current balances (as of 12/15/2004): Paypal $2393.26 Checking $19756.73 Premium Mkt. $100036.26 Total $122186.25 Chuck noted that our PayPal account may actually have about $500 more than the above, since he has noticed a recent "upsurge" in donations. D. Exec. V.P. and Secretary [Jim] Except for the trickle of CLAs (both corporate and individual) and the occasional software grant, the ASF office has received no notice that requires board attention. Due to the Thanksgiving holiday and the general crazyness of this timeframe, Jim was unable to draft the ASF Board and Member Meetings minutes; these will be submitted asap. 5. Committee Reports A. Apache APR Project [Cliff Woolley] See Attachment A Apache APR Project report approved as submitted by general consent. B. Apache Excalibur Project [Leo Simons] See Attachment B Apache Excalibur Project report approved as submitted by general consent. C. Apache Gump Project [Stefan Bodewig] See Attachment C It was also noted that Gump has progressed to the point where it can build APR and HTTPD. Apache Gump Project report approved as submitted and discussed by general consent. D. Apache Jakarta Project [Henri Yandell] See Attachment D Apache Jakarta Project report approved as submitted by general consent. E. Apache Portals Project [Santiago Gala] See Attachment E No report submitted or received. F. Apache SpamAssassin Project [Daniel Quinlan] See Attachment F Apache SpamAssassin Project report approved as submitted by general consent. G. Apache Web Services Project [Davanum Srinivas] See Attachment G In reponse to "Questions/Concerns" item #4, Dims noted that they had used the proposed corporate CLA. Geir remarked that the "Derby enhanced Corporate CLA" was also worthwhile and would make it more publically available and accessible. Dims would add legal "lessons learned" to the Incubator site. Apache Web ServicesProject report approved as submitted and discussed by general consent. H. Apache XMLBeans Project [Cliff Schmidt] See Attachment H Apache XMLBeans Project report approved as submitted by general consent. I. Public Relations Committee [Brian W. Fitzpatrick] See Attachment I Public Relations Committee report approved as submitted by general consent. J. Infrastructure [Infrastructure team] See Attachment J Apache Infrastructure report approved as submitted by general consent. 6. Special Orders 7. Discussion Items A. LGPL: next steps The board verified that there was a rough consensus that Brians draft letter to the FSF was the right next step. Brian therefore had sent the letter to the FSF on the ASF's behalf. B. Conferences and ConCom It was reported that it was still too early to report on the full results of ApacheCon 2004, held last month, but that the event did appear to make a profit. However, the $25,000 bounced check to the ASF did not alleviate the board's growing concern and unease with Security Travel. There are also some reports of speakers not being paid and/or reimbursed. The board further discussed the difficulties we would face if Security Travel was not chosen as the organizer. Some of the issues would be: the time taken in searching for a new producer, trying to forge a new working relationship, and possibly trying out the new producer with a small conference or involving them with the ApacheCon Europe effort. ConCom is discussing internally the basic question "What Is, Or Should Be, ApacheCon." Some suggested considerations were the size of the conference, the pricing structure, and target audience(s) of the conference. The board spent some time in executive session discussing our contract details with Security Travel. 8. Unfinished Business None. 9. New Business None. 10. Announcements None. 11. Adjournment Scheduled to adjourn by 11:30 PST -0800. Adjourned at 11:43. ============ ATTACHMENTS: ============ ----------------------------------------- Attachment A: Status report for the Apache APR Project ApacheCon was particularly good for the APR project (and several others apparently) this year. In previous quarters we reported somewhat of a stagnation of the project, but that we hoped that some of the new committers we were bringing in would help to freshen up the overall level of interest in the project. That has indeed proved true, but furthermore, getting all of us together and having us duke it out over several days' worth of friendly but very heated lunchtime discussions has served to re-ignite the spark of interest that has historically kept this group motivated. In the time during and since the 'Con, we have migrated to Subversion, brought in a couple of more new committers, released APR 0.9.5 and 1.0.1, and begun the process of moving toward either APR 1.1.x or 2.0.x (the latter might be necessary due to versioning rules and some problems that were discovered recently in our 64-bit ABI). We feel that it would be in the best interests of this and other projects if "mini-hackathons" could be held several times per year -- these would be informal (likely project-specific) gatherings of people who are within reasonable geographical proximity of each other to allow them to just Get Things Done. While decisions would still be made on the mailing list as always, it's amazing what a difference being in the same room makes in terms of lowering the latency in big debates and in terms of keeping people focused on big coding endeavors. These sessions could perhaps be hosted at the offices of some of the project members involved so that overhead is minimal. To the extent that the board can facilitate such events (without having them turn into full-fledged conferences requiring the intervention of 3rd-party planners), that would quite likely be worthwhile. ----------------------------------------- Attachment B: Status report for the Apache Excalibur Project This is the december board report for the Excalibur project. * we added a new committer: Leo Sutic. (Leo has previously been active within the avalon project.) * we added a new committer: Marcus Crafter. (Marcus has previously been active within the avalon project.) * we took over responsibility of some codebases from the avalon project: * Avalon-Framework * Logkit * Cornerstone Migration of these codebases to the excalibur project has been initiated. Some things (like updating some parts of our website) still need to be finished. * thanks to a lot of help from the gump community excalibur is now building much better in nightly gump runs. * there were no changes in PMC composition and no releases. ----------------------------------------- Attachment C: Status report for the Apache Gump Project Brutus: * access to brutus has been granted to Niclas Hedhman * we've established an experimental Gump-independent nightly build system on http://brutus.apache.org/~nightlybuild/ that is currently used by Excalibur and Ant. Other: * no PMC changes, still all Apache committers have access to metadata in CVS, no releases ----------------------------------------- Attachment D: Status report for the Apache Jakarta Project == October-December 2004 == === Status === The last three months have seen the first migrations from CVS to SVN in the Jakarta project with the ORO and Velocity projects moving over. More projects are expected to move over in the next quarter, with ECS and Commons being the first two targetted. The board suggested that the previous report needed more sub-project news, and so for this reoprt any sub-project that has a release, or a change in status, needs to supply a short piece of text on the current situation for that part of Jakarta. The community has responded very well and the chair has not had to write any of the subproject section this time around. Being able to use LGPL has been brought up a few times in the last quarter. It has come up with a desire to use Hibernate in various codebases and Dumbster for unit tests in Commons-Email. Dumbster relicenced under ASL 2.0 wihle Hibernate use is still unsolved. Linked to this was a similar issue with JGraph, which dual-licenced with MPL in order to allow us to use it, though the move for this did not come from within the Jakarta community afaik. I'll be aiming to report back to the community on the status of this issue in the week after the next board meeting. On the licence side, a Commons component (VFS) wishes to have a component which depends on a Novell licence. We're currently treating this as similar to Sun's licensing for JavaMail. Imports allowed, but no jars in CVS or iBiblio. Additionally, we have a Clover license for use by Jakarta (and the rest of the ASF). This should make it easier for us to show the high level of our unit tests. In terms of releases, the major points of this quarter's releases are a set of 1.0's from the Commons sub-project (Math, Configuration, Jelly-RC1, Chain) which shows that the Commons community continues to grow, and the stable Tomcat 5.5 release, our most popular product. === Possible plans for the next quarter === * Lucene and Slide both considering TLP. * Commons HttpClient to Jakarta sub-project. * Turbine JCS to Jakarta sub-project. * More Subversion migrations - ECS and Commons in the planning. * Turbine migration to SVN under consideration -- desire JCS resolution. * Improvement of the download page. * Automate creation of Maven bundles and automate bundle uploading to Maven repository, even for projects which use Ant (not Maven) for building. === Releases === ==== December ==== * 9 December 2004 - Commons Chain 1.0 * 9 December 2004 - Commons Math 1.0 * 7 December 2004 - Lucene 1.4.3 * 3 December 2004 - Commons Validator 1.1.4 * 2 December 2004 - Tomcat 5.5.5-beta ==== November ==== * 25 November 2004 - Tomcat 5.0.30-beta * 23 November 2004 - Commons Jelly 1.0-RC1 * 21 November 2004 - Commons HttpClient 3.0 beta1 * 19 November 2004 - JMeter 2.0.2 * 10 November 2004 - Tomcat 5.5.4 (first stable release of Tomcat 5.5) ==== October ==== * 30 October 2004 - Tomcat 5.5.4-alpha * 28 October 2004 - Turbine 2.3.1 * 17 October 2004 - Tapestry 3.0.1 * 11 October 2004 - Tomcat 4.1.31-stable * 11 October 2004 - Commons HttpClient 2.0.2 * 11 October 2004 - Commons Configuration 1.0 * 06 October 2004 - Tomcat 5.5.3-alpha * 06 October 2004 - Tomcat 5.0.29-beta * 04 October 2004 - Commons Betwixt 0.6 === Community changes === ===== New ASF members ===== * 19 November 2004 - Yoav Shapira (yoavs) - Tomcat, Commons ===== New PMC members ===== * 11 October 2004 - James Mason (masonjm) - Slide * 19 October 2004 - Robert Burell Donkin (rdonkin) - Commons ===== New Committers ===== * 4 December 2004 - Warwick Burrows (wburrows) - Slide * 12 November 2004 - Oliver Heger (oheger) - Commons * 7 November 2004 - Hans Gilde (hgilde) - Commons * 6 November 2004 - Bernhard Messer (bmesser) - Lucene * 25 September 2004 - David Spencer (dspencer) - Lucene === Infrastructure news === === Subproject news === (based on projects that have had a notable event, ie) release, change of location within Jakarta) * Commons * Betwixt Betwixt is a bean <-> xml binder. Jakarta Commons Betwixt 0.6 featured a refactored codebase including rewriting bean reading code but preserved backwards compatibility with the earlier releases. A 0.6.1 release (with more functionality and some bug fixes) is expected soon. Betwixt is small component closely related to several other commons components. The Betwixt community is very happy in the commons. * Chain Commons Chain 1.0 was finally released, the component having been promoted from the sandbox to Commons Proper in July. We expect to see Chain put into use almost immediately by projects such as Apache Struts. * Configuration Commons Configuration is an API to deal easily with various configuration formats (properties files, xml files, JNDI...) We have finally stabilized and released the first official release after a slow maturation of 3 years across various Jakarta projects. Many new ideas are floating around and a new release (1.1) is expected in late December or early January. * Daemon Commons Daemon, although quiet on the mailing list and in Bugzilla, has seen a few bug fixes and improvements. Efforts have been made to improve stability on various operating systems. A Commons-Daemon 1.1 release is forthcoming, most likely in early 2005. * Email A few very enthusiastic volunteers have helped re-energize Commons Email. Extensive unit tests were submitted via Bugzilla, a few lingering bugs were cleared up and documentation was extended. This activity led to a successful vote for promotion from the Sandbox. In preparation for the promotion, it was realized that there was an issue with the [http://quintanasoft.com/dumbster/ Dumbster] library, which is used for unit tests and which was only available under the LGPL license. When this was brought up with the developer of Dumbster, he agreed to change his license to ASF 2.0. A vote on a 1.0 release is likely to be called soon after the promotion is completed. Commons Email and Commons Chain have recently run into issues using Maven as a build tool with their dependencies on libraries which are only distributed under the Sun Binary Code License. One of Maven's strengths is the automatic retrieval of dependencies, but the SBCL prevents hosting of these libraries on a public Maven repository. Individual developers must retrieve these libraries independently. This issue also is also complicating automated build processes. An enhancement request has been filed for the Maven Ant plugin which may help some, but our understanding is that the terms of this license will continue to require more manual intervention for these projects than for other Commons projects. * HttpClient HttpClient has entered the 3.0 beta stage. The API is now frozen unless major problems are discovered. We hope to have a final 3.0 release by the end of 2004 or early 2005. Now that 3.0 is nearing completion we anticipate beginning HttpClient 4.0 soon. This release will feature a number of major changes with the main focus on making HttpClient more compact and reusable. The core HTTP library will be refactored into into smaller separable pieces with the HTTP methods separated into request/response pairs. We also plan to start working on a number of application level components such as a simple HTTP proxy, web crawler, etc. that build upon HttpClient. The core library and components will be released at the Jakarta level. * Jelly We are finally nearing a 1.0 release. We've put out a release candidate, have some minor bugs to address and are looking to better our documentation of Jelly's taglibs. * Math We have finally released 1.0 after a laborious 18 months of steady commitment by the whole team. * Resources Resources has been promoted out of the Sandbox and into Commons Proper. This component has been around, and has been stable, for some time now. A 1.0 release is anticipated in the near future. * Transaction Transaction has been promoted out of the Sandbox and into Commons Proper and a 1.0 release candidate has been released. Transaction provides utility classes commonly used in transactional Java programming. * Validator Validator 1.1.4 has been released. This is a minor maintenance release to the 1.1.x branch adding a couple of missing properties to the API. * Slide The Slide community is working towards the 2.1 release. It introduces lots of new features and fixes most important bugs of Slide 2.0. As Slide has become huge with lots of different components grouped around WebDAV releasing single components all by themselves now is an option. * Tapestry The current stable release is 3.0.1. Work is well under way by Howard Lewis Ship and others for 3.1, which will have major changes, including friendly URLs, HiveMind for services, simplified component parameters, and simplified page parameters. The community of users has been growing rapidly. * Tomcat Tomcat reached a significant milestone with the first stable release of the 5.5 branch, v5.5.4. The release has been well-received, with only a small number of bug reports, especially given the magnitude of the changes from Tomcat 5.0.x. Work continues on the 5.0.x branch in maintenance mode, fixing significant bugs as well as any security, Spec-compliance, and showstopper issues as always. The 5.0.30 release was cut near the end of November, addressing the vast majority of open 5.0.x issues. Older branches of Tomcat (3.x, 4.x), are practically at end-of-life support. There are no planned releases for them at this time, although individual Tomcat committers may continue working on the code base. The Tomcat connectors have also been active, led by Mladen Turk's efforts. Mod_jk2 is officially at end-of-life as well: while a worthy experiment, its design proved too fragile, resulting in numerous significant bugs. Maintenance and improvements continue on the original mod_jk, as well as joint work with httpd developers on a new mod_proxy extension slated for inclusion in the 2.1 versions of Apache httpd. There has been significant effort by the Tomcat developers and members of the community to shore up documentation, both in the Tomcat-proper (i.e. part of our CVS), and in our FAQ, Wiki, and external resources. We've seen a demonstrated reduction in the documentation-related complaints and questions over the past couple of months, and intend to continue working in this area. * Turbine Turbine is working towards a new major release, 2.4 which will be based on a componentized architecture. A second milestone is expected in December. The first components from the Fulcrum repostitory have been voted and released. ----------------------------------------- Attachment E: Status report for the Apache Portals Project ----------------------------------------- Attachment F: Status report for the Apache SpamAssassin Project Support needed: * We need attention from ASF legal on standards licensing issues, particularly the Yahoo! patent license. Highlights of Events from August to now: * SpamAssassin 2.64 was released on 2004-08-04 as a non-ASF release to address a potential denial of service attack open to certain malformed messages (only seen once in wild, probably broken spamware). 3.0.0 was fixed prior to release. * We had a successful 3.0.0 release on 2004-09-22 and a successful 3.0.1 release on 2004-10-22. * We finished our logo contest in time for the 3.0.0 release, the winning logo came from Christian Rauh. * We are roughly targeting February for our 3.1 release which focuses on speed and accuracy improvements. * The ASF, SpamAssassin PMC, and James PMC submitted comments to IETF MARID working group regarding patent-encumbrances in the Sender-ID specification. We dodged a bullet where the IETF might have endorsed an email standard incompatible with open source. * We are still talking (primarily through Larry Rosen of OSI) to Microsoft regarding the Sender-ID patent license (Microsoft is still strongly pushing the technology) and are also in the process of reviewing the Yahoo! patent license for DomainKeys, which might set a reasonable precedent for email patent licensing. * We added a new PMC member, Michael Parker. We now have 6 PMC members from a pool of 9 active committers. * ApacheCon: There were 3 SpamAssassin sessions at ApacheCon and a BOF: SpamAssassin Tutorial, Daniel Quinlan New and upcoming features in SpamAssassin v3, Theo Van Dinter Storing SpamAssassin User Data in SQL Databases, Michael Parker * ASF integration progress: - Replacing the one private non-ASF mailing list still in use with an ASF list is still to be done. - Moving the spamassassin.org domain: not much progress. Changing ownership for .org domains is apparently non-trivial. However, the spamassassin.org domain is not really used any more. ----------------------------------------- Attachment G: Status report for the Apache Web Services Project Actions taken in the last quarter: 1. We've been releasing RC's for Axis 1.2. Need to pass the TCK's before we can ship. 2. Bootstrapped 3 new projects from internal efforts. - Apache Scout (JAXR implementation for UDDI) - Apache Kandula (WS-Coordination, WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-BusinessActivity) - Apache EWS (JSR 109 Artifacts and Geronimo Integration) 3. We have 3 new projects under incubation contributed by HP and Globus - Apollo (WS-RF Implementation) - Hermes (WSN and WS-Eventing) - Muse (WSDM MUWS) 4. Axis 2.0 work is in full swing. 5. We have a received a proposal from an existing open source project to adopt some of their Grid projects. This is interesting. The underpinnings of the Java side of the project are Axis and extensions - WS-A and WSRF, so there is much common underlying technology. If we go ahead with this incubation, then long term there may be an opportunity for a Grid section within Apache. Questions/Concerns: 1. Need concrete guidance and approved versions of CCLA, Software Grant, Trademark Assignment etc. 2. Need confirmation that the PMC does *NOT* have to pro-actively monitor web sites, press releases and legal documents to see if any of our code infringes on others claims. (CommerceOne Patents in the news) 3. We have been waiting forever for sample "package-wide COPYRIGHT file". Re-posting to licensing@ does not seem to help at all. 4. Can we **PLEASE** get our act together to update the ASF web site with a all info? (CCLA, Software Grant, Trademark Assignment, package-wide COPYRIGHT file etc...) ----------------------------------------- Attachment H: Status report for the Apache XMLBeans Project Actions taken in the last quarter: 1. Moved from CVS to SVN! Thanks to the help of David Waite and the Infrastructure team (IIRC, mainly Justin) 2. Removed David Remy as committer and PMC member at his request due to employer IP issues :-( 3. ApacheCon: Strong attendance at ApacheCon XMLBeans session. Also held a tutorial on XMLBeans/Schema. 4. User list and dev list continue to grow. 5. Did not complete a few items that I had hoped we would by this time. See below. Intentions for next quarter (some originally planned for this last quarter, but didn't get done): 1. Get XMLBeans charter agreed on and approved 2. Get a project logo 3. Work with XML community to define XML federation 4. Release new distribution. Note that this will require clearing legal issues around use of JSR-173 - will follow up on legal mailing list. ----------------------------------------- Attachment I: Status report for the Public Relations Committee Support Needed: - Hiring additional personnel to help execute fundraising programs. - Financial resources to allow more frequent PRC face-to-face meetings. - Financial resources to contract out for new logo designs - Treasurer follow-up on donateacar.com as we've 'lost' cars that were donated. - Clarification of licensing terms of feather with respect to ConCom ==== We had a productive face-to-face meeting of the PRC at ApacheCon. At the meeting, we felt that the PRC is heavily limited by the fact that we are all volunteers (as no one has the time desired) and amateurs (as no one is really experienced in this area as much as we'd like to be). We discussed the possibility of having more frequent face-to-face PRC meetings, as resources permit. (i.e. a two or three day session where we can hammer out details like a sponsorship and logo policy.) We've received a very nice external donation from Omidyar Network and we've been in coordination with them about what they will post about the donation. PayPal still continues to be our largest source of revenue to date. Our sponsorship program is on hold until we can acquire enough resources to execute the program. We continue to work with PMCs on press opportunities and are using them as a learning experience on how to set our policies. Our current policy is to defer the decision of involvement with a press release to the appropriate PMC and then act as directed by the respective PMCs. We are continuting to investigate branding and logo usage guidelines. Sally Khudairi has forwarded us the W3C publicity guidelines that she helped create. In the coming quarter, we expect to make progress towards the adoption of standard logo policies with an initial investigation towards contracting out to a logo design firm for 'refreshed' logos. (The PRC has decided against running any sort of logo contest and wish to seek professionally designed logos.) We have also had some preliminary discussion with our legal counsel (via legal-internal@) regarding registering the ASF feather as a trademark in the US. At this time, we do not have a formal recommendation to make as we're still collecting information from our legal counsel about what course to take. The PRC has started the process of terminating the Jinx contract as we haven't been receiving any income from this 'partnership' over the last several years. Ken's 'Rodent's Cache' site brought in modest revenue for Q3 and is expected to grow in the about-to-complete Q4. The PRC recommends that our treasurer to follow up with donateacar.com (as apparently we have 'lost' cars that we know were donated to us) or switch the authorized contact to be prc@ so that we can follow up on this. We've signed up with Booksense (and perhaps Amazon?) for book affiliates deals and expect to start posting pages in this next quarter. The PRC has also agreed that the ConCom should be licensed by the PRC to use our feather in respect to conference promotional material, but they have no other rights to sub-licensing the feather without explicit PRC approval. We'll note that Security Travel took it upon themselves to authorize use of our feather to third parties without ASF approval. This has caused us a number of issues in dealing with companies that are using our marks (in non-ApacheCon venues) without approval as Security Travel approved their usage. So, the companies were acting in good faith, but Security Travel was not authorized to do so. ----------------------------------------- Attachment J: Status report for the Infrastructure Committee We're transitioning from nagoya to ajax. We've submitted the final H/W list to Sam for IBM, and are waiting to hear back from him. We're going to proceed with the purchase of a UPS for our co-lo rack shortly. We are also coordinating an infrastructure get-together in SF for Q1 2005 so that we can address the pressing large-scale items on our plate with as many people in the same room as possible and near our servers to coordinate server hardware and software upgrades. Financial assistance to help bring the participants together is desired. ------------------------------------------------------ End of minutes for the December 15, 2004 board meeting.