The Apache Software Foundation Board of Directors Meeting Agenda December 20, 2006 1. Call to order The meeting was scheduled for 10:00 (Pacific) and was begun when a sufficient attendance to constitute a quorum was recognized by the Chair at 10:05. The meeting was held by teleconference, hosted by Jim Jagielski and Covalent: US Number : 800-531-3250 International : 303-928-2693 IRC #asfboard on irc.freenode.net was used for backup purposes. 2. Roll Call Directors Present: Justin Erenkrantz Dirk-Willem van Gulik Jim Jagielski Cliff Schmidt Greg Stein Sander Striker Henri Yandell Directors Absent: Ken Coar Sam Ruby Sander Striker Guests: Geir Magnusson Jr 3. Minutes from previous meetings Minutes (in Subversion) are found under the URL: https://svn.apache.org/repos/private/foundation/board/ A. The meeting of October 25, 2006 See: board_minutes_2006_10_25.txt Minutes of the meeting of October 25, 2006 were approved by General Consent. B. The meeting of November 15, 2006 See: board_minutes_2006_11_15.txt Note: Still awaiting confirmation from Geir regarding what in his report he wanted published. These minutes were tabled, while awaiting feedback from Geir. 4. Officer Reports A. Chairman [Greg] Greg had nothing too much to report. He remains happy with the progress of the foundation. B. President [Sander] No report. C. Treasurer [Justin] As seen in the balances below, Google's partial sponsorship check has arrived. We have not received any other payments for the program; so, I am not comfortable asking for the remainder of the agreed-upon sum from Google without jeopardizing our public charity status until more sponsorships are received. I know Jim has had some conversations with potential sponsors lately, so the outlook isn't bleak - I would expect some progress to occur after folks return from winter vacations next month. As mentioned last month, I have migrated my 'treasurer setup' to a new machine and upgraded to QuickBooks 2007. A steady stream of lockbox payments have arrived. However, I have not yet had time to figure out how to produce the donor listing reports yet with the new version of QB - I will try to do so soon. Last year, I did it manually; but I think there's a way to get the report done automatically from QB. Current balances (as of 12/19/2006): Paypal $ 1,255.28 (+$ 691.55) Checking $ 38,878.87 (+$ 21,829.88) Savings $201,429.41 (+$ 10,457.29) Total $241,563.56 (+$ 32,978.72) During Justin's talk, Jim was asked to provide updated information regarding the Sponsorship program. Jim reported that the Sponsorship page is now online and linked to the main ASF page. He has also been in contact with other protential sponsors. Work still needs to be done on the Thanks page and the logos. D. Exec. V.P. and Secretary [Jim] Good progress is being made in scanning and archiving all ASF documentation. As a reminder, newly received iCLAs, CCLAs and grants get immediately recorded and scanned/archived. Older documents are being scanned in semi-priority order, with important ASF docs (like incorporation papers, etc), followed by grants, CCLAs and iCLAs. We are anticipating receiving the list of Donation Acknowledgement recipients from Justin. These are the "thank you" letters that we are required to send out to those who have donated above a certain level. This week we received a check from Car Program LLC and a bill from CSC. The check is being forwarded to the lockbox and the bill was paid using the ASF credit card. We have received no correspondance that requires board attention... Things have been slow, but steady. E. VP of Legal Affairs [Cliff] CLA UPDATE: I sent an update to legal-discuss last week to let everyone know that the plan is to publish a document that describes the original intention behind some of the ambiguities in the CLA and then to discuss the idea of a new version. Roy has agreed to write the "original intention" doc based on what statements he had made about the CLA's interpretation while he was ASF chair. GPLv3 COMPATIBILITY: The SFLC contacted me about the latest proposed changes to the patent licensing in the next draft of GPLv3. I am reviewing now to ensure these changes would still allow Apache-Licensed works to be included in GPLv3-licensed works. STANDARDS LICENSING: I reviewed the BPEL specification patent licenses for Apache ODE. The licenses would not be acceptable by the ASF; however, there do not currently appear to be any patents to license. So, I see no problem with ODE implementing the BPEL spec. Another spec reviewed was the Yahoo-submitted IETF RFC on DomainKeys. Noel submitted this to legal-internal by Noel for review during ApacheCon US. I reviewed and commented on it there; while not ideal, it appears reasonable and should not hold back our development. My analyses for both BPEL and DomainKeys was approved by our legal counsel on legal-internal. F. VP of JCP [Geir] Changes to the JSPA : There is an ongoing JSR consisting of EC members targetted at modifying the JSPA for the JCP. Of main interest to us is discussion surrounding "ex-ante disclosure" of all IP licensing terms for each JSR at time of JSR completion so that an implementor has a complete undestanding of any IP licensing issues they will encounter. While the EGs confidentiality rules prevent disclosing details on the public board minutes, just note that it's of interest to the ASF, and I'm working to help increase the amount of up-front exposure required by the JCP process. General : Things are generally smooth, with nothign requiring board action at this time. We have two outstanding requests for new JSRs (web services related). Java SE TCK : Negotiations continue. There is little progress to report in the public minutes. I've proposed a "two phase" approach in which we'd receive the TCK to get started under restrictive terms, and continue final term negotiations, but haven't yet received a formal answer. Current trend is negative, and have asked for a decision by 12/31. 5. Committee Reports A. Apache APR Project [Garrett Rooney / Henri] See Attachment A Greg suggested that they submit a short report in January regarding potential solutions for the MD4/MD5 problem. One possible suggestion was whether they should ask RSA for a grant. Approved by General Consent. B. Apache Excalibur Project [J. Aaron Farr / Jim] See Attachment B Approved by General Consent. C. Apache Gump Project [Stefan Bodewig / Greg] See Attachment C Justin asked if we should dedicate more resources for Gump builds. A beefier machine would likely address any concerns. Justin will discuss this with the project and Infrastructure. Approved by General Consent. D. Apache Harmony Project [Geir Magnusson Jr.] See Attachment D Justin asked what criteria was used to guage 'dev list participation'. Geir responded just the number of messages to the list. Approved by General Consent. E. Apache iBATIS Project [Ted Husted / Sander] See Attachment E There was discussion at this time regarding if the board needed to encourage ConCom or the actual ASF projects to have the ApacheCon events better "spread-out" the visibility of all ASF projects (this in response to the note in the iBATIS report about a tutorial being cancelled). The general feeling was that although ApacheCon is a great place to do that, sessions about "popular" projects are the most well attended and have the better "draw"; it was agreed that ConCom should consider how to provide a better mix. Approved by General Consent. F. Apache Jackrabbit Project [Jukka Zitting / Cliff] See Attachment F Approved by General Consent. G. Apache Jakarta Project [Martin van den Bemt / Justin] See Attachment G Sam (via pre-meeting communication) indicated his "kudos" on the POI move. Greg noted that any PMC change requires a board acknowledgement, even a removal. The "trimming" of the size of Jakarta was discussed, with Henri providing some information that things are still progressing well. Approved by General Consent. H. Apache Labs Project [Stefano Mazzocchi / Dirk] See Attachment H Justin noted that there was discussion on-list about the technical tradeoffs of the current zone policy, but it was agreed that there was no need for the board to interfere at this point. Approved by General Consent. I. Apache Lucene Project [Doug Cutting / Greg] See Attachment I Approved by General Consent. J. Apache Portals Project [Santiago Gala / Dirk] See Attachment J No report provided. Greg noted that their September report noted a possible chair change to address the relatively poor submissions of reports. K. Apache SpamAssassin Project [Justin Mason / Justin] See Attachment K Justin asked if there was any PR about the Linux New Media Aware received by SpamAssassin. Jim reported that there was none from the PRC, nor was any requested. The board noted that the projects should be encouraged to work with the PRC and to update the "News" area of the site when noteworthy events or awards happen. Approved by General Consent. L. Apache Tomcat Project [Yoav Shapira / Ken] See Attachment L Justin asked if the security team (aka security@apache.org) was involved regarding the "security" issue noted in the Tomcat report. Yoav, via out-of-meeting correspondance, indicated that they were. Approved by General Consent. M. Apache Web Services Project [Davanum Srinivas / Jim] See Attachment M Approved by General Consent. N. Apache XMLBeans Project [Cezar Andrei / Cliff] See Attachment N Approved by General Consent. O. Apache Incubator Project [Noel Bergman / Henri] See Attachment O There was discussion regarding Woden and whether its current level of diversity was adequate. It was noted that IBM and WSO2 have the "majority respresentation" but that, considering the Mentors of the podlings, the board trusts them (and the Incubator itself) to ensure diversity. Henri noted that log4php hasn't had a commit in 10 months and looks to only have the one committer. Justin noted that Wicket would like a license inclusion exception for small files. The board agreed that this made sense. Approved by General Consent. P. Conferences Committee [Ken Coar] See Attachment P Justin provided a short post-report activity for ConCom: 1. Atlanta in Dec has been chosen as 2007 US site. 2. Venue decision for 2008 US should happen today (Wed). Approved by General Consent. Q. Apache Velocity Project [Henning Schmiedehausen / Sander] See Attachment Q Approved by General Consent. 6. Special Orders A. Update Apache Security Team Membership WHEREAS, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) Board Commmittee, known as the Apache Security Team expects to better serve its purpose through the periodic update of its membership; and WHEREAS, the Apache Security Team is a Board-appointed committee whose membership must be approved by Board resolution. NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the following ASF members be added as Apache Security Team members: * Lars Eilebrecht (lars@apache.org) * William A. Rowe (wrowe@apache.org) * Sander Striker (striker@apache.org) Special Order 6A, Updating the Apache Security Team Membership, was approved by Unanimous Vote. B. Establish Apache Open for Business Project 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 enterprise automation, for distribution at no charge to the public. NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that a Project Management Committee (PMC), to be known as the "The Apache Open For Business Project" (also known as "Apache OFBiz"), be and hereby is established pursuant to Bylaws of the Foundation; and be it further RESOLVED, that The Apache Open For Business Project be and hereby is responsible for the creation and maintenance of a software project related to generic enterprise information automation such as enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, materials requirements planning, enterprise asset management, enterprise content management and electronic commerce that can be used as a basis for custom solutions, industry specific products, and other higher level systems; and be it further RESOLVED, that the office of "Vice President, Open For Business" 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 Open For Business Project, and to have primary responsibility for management of the projects within the scope of responsibility of The Apache Open For Business Project; 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 Open For Business Project: * David E. Jones (jonesde@apache.org) * Jacopo Cappellato (jacopoc@apache.org) * Si Chen (sichen@apache.org) * Andy Zeneski (jaz@apache.org) * Hans Bakker (hansbak@apache.org) * Al Byers (byersa@apache.org) * Yoav Shapira (yoavs@apache.org) * David Welton (davidw@apache.org) NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that David E. Jones be and hereby is appointed to the office of Vice President, Open For Business, 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 Open For Business Project be and hereby is tasked with the migration and rationalization of the Apache Incubator Open For Business podling; and be it further RESOLVED, that all responsibility pertaining to the Apache Incubator Open For Business podling encumbered upon the Apache Incubator PMC are hereafter discharged. There was some discussion on whether this project was "umbrella-like". It was agreed that the current setup of the project was such that the "overlap" of all aspects of the project was sufficient that it was not a concern. Special Order 6B, Establishment of the Apache Open for Business Project, was approved by Unanimous Vote. C. Establish Apache Cayenne Project 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 object-relational mapping (ORM) and remoting services, for distribution at no charge to the public. NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that a Project Management Committee (PMC), to be known as the "The Apache Cayenne Project", be and hereby is established pursuant to Bylaws of the Foundation; and be it further RESOLVED, that The Apache Cayenne Project be and hereby is responsible for the creation and maintenance of a software project related to object-relational mapping (ORM) and remoting services; and be it further RESOLVED, that the office of "Vice President, Cayenne" 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 Cayenne Project, and to have primary responsibility for management of the projects within the scope of responsibility of The Apache Cayenne Project; 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 Cayenne Project: * Andrus Adamchik (aadamchik@apache.org) * Bill Dudney (bdudney@apache.org) * Michael Gentry (mgentry@apache.org) * Tore Halset (torehalset@apache.org) * Mike Kienenberger (mkienenb@apache.org) NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Andrus (Andrei) Adamchik be and hereby is appointed to the office of Vice President, Cayenne, 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 Cayenne Project be and hereby is tasked with the migration and rationalization of the Apache Incubator Cayenne podling; and be it further RESOLVED, that all responsibility pertaining to the Apache Incubator Cayenne podling encumbered upon the Apache Incubator PMC are hereafter discharged. It was noted that there were no ASF members on the PMC list and this generated minor concern with the board. Jim volunteered to "keep an eye" on the new project. Special Order 6C, Establishment of the Apache Cayenne Project, was approved by Unanimous Vote. D. Establish Apache Tiles Project 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 continued implementation of the page composition and layout management framework currently known as Apache Struts Tiles, 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 Tiles Project", be and hereby is established pursuant to Bylaws of the Foundation; and be it further RESOLVED, that the Apache Tiles Project be and hereby is responsible for the creation and maintenance of software related to the Tiles template framework; and be it further RESOLVED, that the office of "Vice President, Apache Tiles" 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 Tiles Project, and to have primary responsibility for management of the projects within the scope of responsibility of the Apache Tiles Project; 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 Tiles Project: * Antonio Petrelli (apetrelli@apache.org) * Craig McClanahan (craigmcc@apache.org) * David H. DeWolf (ddewolf@apache.org) * Greg Reddin (greddin@apache.org) * Nathan Bubna (nbubna@apache.org) * Wendy Smoak (wsmoak@apache.org) NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Greg Reddin be appointed to the office of Vice President, Apache Tiles, 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 Tiles Project be and hereby is tasked with the migration and rationalization of the Apache Struts Tiles sub-project; and be it further RESOLVED, that all responsibility pertaining to the Struts Tiles sub-project and encumbered upon the Apache Struts PMC are hereafter discharged. Special Order 6D, Establishment of the Apache Tiles Project, was approved by Unanimous Vote. 7. Discussion Items 8. Review Outstanding Action Items SAM: release management for HiveMind GSTEIN: talk to Noel about user/dev mailing lists for podlings ==> noel says "post to general" SAM: talk to santuario about the podling SANDER: find out about grant w.r.t Xerces Jim reported that he had redirected Jason and the Maven PMC to the PRC regarding the use of the Maven mark. 9. Unfinished Business 10. New Business 11. Announcements 12. Adjournment Scheduled to adjourn by 12:00 (Pacific). Adjourned at 11:30. ============ ATTACHMENTS: ============ ----------------------------------------- Attachment A: Status report for the Apache APR Project APR currently has a few legal issues that need to be resolved, but other than that there are no issues that currently require the board attention. Since the last board report we released APR 1.2.8 and 0.9.13, two bug fix releases that as far as I can tell have been well received, with no catastrophic problems being found post-release. There has also been the usual series of bug fixes and new patches, but there has been no substantial work towards a new major version or anything of that sort. While people have ideas for what an APR 2.0 would do, actual coding work seems to be hung up waiting on someone having a burning need for one of these new features, so APR 1.x seems to be APR 2.x's biggest enemy. It works well enough for what people require. There have been no new committers added, and no changes to the membership of the PMC. In the legal realm we still have the Crypto notification paperwork to file. I will be taking care of that this weekend, and I wish to make it clear that it's solely my fault that it's taken this long to get finished. Additionally, in October some questions were raised about the legality of the MD4/MD5 code we currently have in our tree (and have had for approximately 10 years). Looking over the mailing list archives there appears to be some lack of consensus as to what needs to happen, although there are a number of people who feel we need clarification from RSA about the issue. I plan to reread the mailing list threads and post a summary to the list asking for input as to the proper approach to take. Note that there is also an alternative implementation that we may be able to use, but it seems kind of scary to replace such old and well tested code. The only other issue currently facing the APR project remains the fact that there are few active developers, and keeping on top of patches and whatnot can be difficult. Specifically, we have some fairly large contributions (the one that sticks out in my mind is the apr threadpool stuff) that have not yet been integrated simply because of a lack of interested developers with suitable free time. I hope this issue will work itself out over time as more new developers present themselves. ----------------------------------------- Attachment B: Status report for the Apache Excalibur Project Items of note No new committers. No new PMC members. No new releases. Jorg Heymans started a release process just before ApacheCon US but it has stalled. I've sent an email to the list and I think we'll get it released before the end of the month. Otherwise, not much activity. ----------------------------------------- Attachment C: Status report for the Apache Gump Project Infrastructure: * We had a little outage after the colo migration since vmgump didn't come up properly. Yet another reason to look forward to the beefer machine Justin hinted at last time. Technical: * Stefano has set up a Gump build running on top of Harmony[1] which currently is stuck by not finding a javac command line compatible compiler. * Much of the gump side of Maven2 support is done, Bill Barker now also wants to give the Maven side a try - we need to make Maven use the jars created by gump instead of those from any local or remote repository. There is hope. * sourceforge has found a new way to keep us moving stuff around. They are now moving the subversion repositories to virtual hosts per project, which means changing descriptors and deleting working copies on all Gump instances again. Won't be the last time. Other: * Sander Temme has been added to the PMC on 2006-12-01. * still all Apache committers have access to metadata in svn. * no releases. Footnotes: [1] http://67.86.14.213:10000/gump/ ----------------------------------------- Attachment D: Status report for the Apache Harmony Project Issues requiring the Board's attention: none. Infrastructure -------------- We have now completed our second full month of TLP, and with the recent creation of our Solaris Zone, we have no outstanding infrastructure requests, and thank the ASF infrastructure team for helping us with our transition from the Incubator. We plan on adding a few new mail lists, one for our community-distributed build/test system alerts, and eventually one for users. Development ----------- The project continues to make progress towards it's primary goal of a complete implementation of Java SE 5. We have over 96% of the Java SE 5 class library complete, and the virtual machine continues to make substantial progress. We look forward to securing the JCK for Java SE 6 to start integrating it into our build/test frameworks as to immediately begin testing the portions of the classlibrary that we believe are spec complete. While I can't quantify the VM as I can the class library in terms of measurable completeness, it's clear we're making good progress due to the continued improvements in stability, functionality and performance. We also have quite a bit of progress in the area of documentation and website, with a committed set of community members focused on that. In the last month we completed substantial work on our "JDK tools" part of the project, which is the code and build infrastructure for the additional programs that come with the runtime environment in the "Java Development Kit" (aka JDK). As of now, we have a JDK that has "java" (the runtime), "javac" (the Java language to bytecode compiler, based on the Eclipse ECJ compiler), "javah" (C header and stub file generator), and "keytool" (used for manipulating keys and certificates), and will continue to work to complete the full toolchain. Security -------- Mid November, a user identified a potential vulnerability in the codebase pertaining to a thread being able to mine values owned by other threads in the so-called "ThreadLocal" storage. This was identified on the private@ list, and after the PMC determined that there was no real need continued discussion in secrecy, we moved the discussion to the public list and resolved to everyone's satisfaction. Community --------- On the community front, things are fairly static. We are seeing a small drop in our dev list participation numbers, but there are no known reasons why, other than seasonal variability. In late November, Sun announced the creation of their open source Java project called "OpenJDK". They will be releasing over the next 6 months the source code to Java SE 6, under the GPLv2 and GPLv2+Classpath Exception licenses. As of now, they have released their "javac" Java-language-to-bytecode compiler and their VM to the community under the GPLv2 license. Currently, they are still working out the details regarding their community structure. We expect that this action will have at least a short term affect on our community, simply because it's a more advanced codebase, and an alternative community for people to participate in. Overall, though, this is a positive thing for the open source Java ecosystem, and we'll continue to look for ways to bridge the two communities. One final community note - the Apache Gump project has been working towards using Harmony as a "base" for their activities, and with the recent completion of the "javac" compiler in Harmony, we're hoping that we'll soon start seeing full Gump runs on the Harmony JDK. ----------------------------------------- Attachment E: Status report for the Apache iBATIS Project Since our September 2006 report, the Apache iBATIS project has marked version 2.2.0 for Java as a "General Availability" release, and we have also made version 2.3.0 available for testing. For some time, iBATIS has included a "Data Access Objects" framework. However, most people in the community now use other solutions, especially Spring, to serve the same purpose. We've been discussing deprecating and archiving the DAO component on and off for over a year. As of iBATIS for Java 2.3.0, the DAO framework is deprecated. Since the beginning, the iBATIS for Java release manager has been Clinton Begin. However, these latest releases were managed by Jeff Butler, from beginning to end. The entire group congratulates both Jeff and Clinton for broadening support for the critical task of release. A new release of iBATIS for .NET is expected early in 2007. iBATIS.NET 1.5.1 is the current "best available" release and was voted GA in August 2006. The 1.5.x series is available for both .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0. We expect that the next release of iBATIS.NET to begin the 2.0.x series. After surveying the user community, we decided to support .NET 2.0 only starting with our own version 2.x. The new iBATIS for Ruby product is in the community-building stages, and we are beginning to receive patches from the general public. Unfortunately, the iBATIS tutorial for ApacheCon US 2006 was among those that were cancelled. Other proposals by iBATIS group members that would have covered iBATIS were passed over by the ConCom, so the iBATIS project was not represented. Hopefully, we will have better luck in 2007. ----------------------------------------- Attachment F: Status report for the Apache Jackrabbit Project Apache Jackrabbit is a fully conforming implementation of the Content Repository for Java Technology API (JCR, specified in JSR 170). The Apache Jackrabbit project has progressed nicely since the September status report. We have no board-level issues at this time. o Releases We have released two versions of Apache Jackrabbit: 1.1 in October and 1.1.1 in December. The 1.2 release is scheduled to happen by the end of the year. o Community No new committers have been added since September. One contributor was just elected for committership, but the process is still pending on us receiving the required CLAs. The number of active contributors has grown lately, and I expect to see new committers being elected in near future. Most notably we've seen a number of contributions from employees of Cognifide, a consulting company with JCR expertise. A CCLA has been requested. There were two short Apache Jackrabbit presentations during the ApacheCon US and some discussion on potential cooperation with other related Apache projects. o Development The Jackrabbit build environment was recently upgraded to Maven 2 along with a restructuring of the Jackrabbit component projects. An initial clustering implementation was added to Jackrabbit core and will go out as a beta feature in the 1.2 release. The Jackrabbit dependencies to Apache Lucene and Apache Derby were upgraded to more recent versions. A number of forward-looking design discussions have occurred on the mailing list, often based on feedback from outside the core development group. o Infrastructure We've requested a Solaris zone for setting up nightly builds and automating integration tests and Maven reporting. ----------------------------------------- Attachment G: Status report for the Apache Jakarta Project First of all I like to mention that I haven't be able to spent the time I wanted to spend, which is something I will try to improve. I like to request special attention is given to the POI subproject section in the report. Another improvement should be that the majority of the report should come from the community, which I am totally failing to delegate atm. I will start actively persuing additions to the board report by our Jakarta committers when events occur. I don't see this as a community problem, the failure is completely mine. Apachecon Austin was my first visit to apachecon and it was a great experience to meet the people I haven't met in person yet. One of the things I had planned was the Jakarta BOF, where I had the idea to give a presentation and get feedback on other peoples thoughts about Jakarta. It gave me some more insight in projects I didn't have too much knowledge about and the nature of the BOF turned out to be more of free discussion and thought outlet. On my todo list is to extract the points that were identified as needing attention and send them to the general list for discussion. Most important on that list is the identity of Jakarta, easy access information of the state the projects are in and Jakarta being more proactive of getting people aboard on the less active or non active projects. Another idea the recently popped up is having experienced mentors "assigned" to projects. With a 100+ projects this seems like a good idea (see JCS for an example of this) PMC : New pmc members: Nick Burch Roland Weber Change : Dany Angus requested to be removed from the PMC. Not acted upon this yet, since he is an ASF member, a change in the committee-info.txt probably is sufficient. New committers : Jurgen Hoffmann was voted on to be able to commit to Jakarta. He earned this because of his devotion on Turbine. Antoine Levy-Lambert, so he can work on Slide (on his own request and voted on by the PMC). Releases : - HttpComponents HttpCore 4.0-alpha3 - Commons Digester 1.8 - Commons Discovery 0.4 - Commons DbUtils 1.1 - Commons Validator 1.3.1 - Commons HttpClient 3.1-beta1 - BSF 2.4.0 - Commons Lang 2.2 - Commons Configuration 1.3 Not yet project commons-ssl: There were announcements on the httpcomponents list (and on the tomcat list) about a release of commons-ssl, which in real life isn't a commons project at all, but an external project, with the intention of joining Jakarta. An CLA is on file and currently an envelope is on the way to Jim, since his employer wants to have a signed copy back. I asked Julius Davies if he could start a proposal on the Jakarta to discuss if we could sponsor the donation. The thread kind of died and I will restart the thread when the paperwork is handled. place. Julies fixed the naming of commons-ssl by calling it Not-Yet-Commons-ssl, with giving an explenation. Link can be found here : http://juliusdavies.ca/commons-ssl/ Projects (currently 15 main projects) BCEL Bcel hardly has any activity and during the BOF I learned that Torsten Curdt adopted BCEL. With the Google summer of code Torsten mentored 1 person working on BCEL and BCEL supports 1.5 now. It could be worth investigating if the 2 forks of BCEL that are out there (Findbugs and AspectJ) can be merged back to BCEL itself, however Torsten said that both forks probably don't want to invest there time in a merge, since the current situation works for them. Currently BCEL is considered legacy and since projects are using it, it is still maintained. If there are signals of people wanting to become active, we will definitely take that opportunity. BSF After about 4 years of no releases, BSF finally got their release, which was in the Apachecon press release. Since the release things have become a bit more quiet and the user list still points to fact that not a lot of users have picked up on the release yet, since there were problems with the downloadscript. It will probably also take time to get the users back that were lost in the past by not having any releases. Personal note : I would like to thank the BSF committers for doing a great job. Cactus Cactus is currently unmaintained. There are still users, but most questions don't get an answer. A lot of people also are wondering if maven2 will be supported and with what j2ee versions cactus will work. There is definitely work to do here (Cargo integration comes to mind). Commons Commons has 33 proper, 11 sandbox and 16 dormant subprojects. Currently there is a huge release boom going on at commons. After past problems with votes not getting any attention I think things have picked up for the better and most votes get attention. The situation is still not perfect and still needs focus. ECS ECS is mature / dormant. The dev list had it's last noise in August. The user list didn't have any traffic since April, which kind of looks like there isn't a user base. Will make this an agenda item. HttpComponents Currently has 3 subprojects : httpasync, httpclient and httpcore. There is lots of activity from developers and from users. Also there are regular releases. JCS As mentioned in previous board reports there was a vote about a release, but no release has happened just yet. Henning Schmiedenhausen offered to mentor the currently active release manager Aaron Smuts. Besides that there isn't much development activity in JCS. There is some user traffic and questions get answered. JMeter Lot's of developer activity and user activity at JMeter. The only thing that is a bit worrying is that Sebastian Bazley is the only committer. I've added this to my todo list to see if there are other candidates to help him out. ORO Very little activity and no developer activity. ORO is very mature. Added to the agenda to see where to go from here. POI There is lot's of activity in POI on developer and user side. Most of the work is done by Nick Burch. Recently a release vote was held, without any visible result. By accident I stumbled on the release announcement made on the POI user list. There was no vote result posted, no checking of the release itself and the PMC wasn't notified of that result. There are currently several issues at POI : - The Jakarta PMC Members that supposed to represent POI and thus (at least) giving oversight to what happens in POI, don't provide that oversight. - It feels like they are acting as a separate entity in Jakarta and even the ASF itself. - There seems to be some legal thing in place where people who want to become a committer need to "swear" that they are not under an NDA from Micrsoft about the office document format. At Apachecon I talked to Jim about this and he isn't aware of anything in place from the board pov (I can confirm that even from the PMC pov we don't have any records of those statements). Besides that we have an ICLA/CCLA to cover this situation. - svn karma is separate from the rest of Jakarta, because of above legal reasons (in March there was voted to open up Jakart svn karma, POI objected to this, so there karma is handled separately. With the release going bad, I decided to start a vote on the general list to open up svn karma for POI. The initial goal I have with this vote, is to make sure that they finally completely join Jakarta, without any exceptions. As a side effect it will remove the psychological barrier that exists when it concerns POI. We trust them to with svn karma for Jakarta and they don't trust us with svn karma. There shouldn't be a need for distrust or this separation. The thing I was warned for with this vote, is that the legal issue would surface and indeed it did. The highest legal priority currently is, at least in my view, the releases that don't conform to ASF standards. If we solve that my next step was (based on the feedback), starting with clearing up and fixing the legal situation for contributing and committing to POI (if that is needed at all). People in the threads refer to the Harmony case, where they require something similar. The big difference is that the PMC handles this and in the POI case no one handles this (at least to my knowledge). The vote is still up untill next friday / saturday. If there are any questions, let me know. Henri is monitoring and participating in the thread and Jim was informed about the thread. Regexp Very little activity and no developer activity. Regexp is very mature. Added to the agenda to see where to go from here. Slide Antoine Levy-Lambert requested karma for Jakarta to be able to work on Slide. Slide still has a user base, but is lacking developers, so we welcomed his request. Antoine said he needed time to get into the code base, so it might take time to get really productive. User questions are mainly answered by other users and some questions stay unanswered Taglibs Has 20 proper, 5 sandbox and 8 deprecated tag libraries. Currently there is a discussion going about going beyond the spec with the standards taglib. Some patching is taking place in the standard taglib and in the RDC taglib. There are regular questions on the user list and all questions are answered. Turbine Turbine exists of 3 subprojects : core, fulcrum and stratum. There is activity from multiple people (svn and wiki), but Jurgen Hoffmann is the one with most cycled to spare for Turbine development. User list seems healthy, where most questions get answers. Velocity The board approved the establishement of the TLP Velocity project. Since you already 2 board reports about Velocity, I don't think it's useful to add a status update. I am aware of the reports and I have no items to add on the todo's of the move. ----------------------------------------- Attachment H: Status report for the Apache Labs Project The Apache Labs project was created Nov 18, 2006 and so far we have 6 labs that were created and one lab that was proposed, got negative feedback from a few PMC members and the lab proponent decided to withdraw the proposition. The negative votes were due to the fact that some of the PMC members believed that the proposed codebase didn't fit the labs charter because it was an already established codebase (not released but already used in production) and that the lab proponent was explicitly looking for ways to engage a bigger community. It was proposed that the incubator was better suited for that kind of activity. It is worth mentioning, though, that there seems to be a perceptual gap between labs and the incubator and such proposal made it very explicit: the incubator is perceived, by some committers, as a very heavy-weight social ecosystem, poorly fitted to transition a committer one-man-show into a open development community. While it is not something that Labs can fix, it is something that graduating labs will have to confront and it is useful for the board to realize that an impedance mismatch between the planned evolutionary work flow for a lab and the reality of committers perception exists. Whether or not this is going to change as a few graduating labs go thru this process is hard to predict, but in the realm of possibilities. From a technological note, the labs are already exhibiting a wide range of technologies (C, java, python, javascript). From an organizational point of view, each lab has its own DOAP descriptor. We also wrote a little DOAPizer tool[1] to help the submission process. We have not have any complains about such requirements as lab PIs don't seem to mind the existing 'metadata tax'. From a charter point of view, it has been vocally suggested that the 'no releases' restriction should be lifted because it makes it substantially harder for labs to gather attention. Again, labs seem to be perceived as a better fit than the incubator for projects that want to attract more usage and developers, but labs is really about research, rather than community building. I have personally stated that I'm not going to allow a re-evaluation of the charting rules before at least 12 months time, time that would allow us to understand better what is really a problem and what is just a committer's perception. This seems to have stabilized this matter, at least for now. On a PR/publishing point of view, a lot of effort went into making sure that the labs.apache.org[2] web site look modern, fresh, fast and it was very easy for a distributed group to maintain. There is already evidence that people like the site and find it easy to modify and adjust. There is still work to do in the automation of web pages generation from DOAP descriptors, but given the current number of labs, there is no hurry and we will let things emerge organically. From an infrastructure point of view, the infrastructure was created timely, the only problem was the creation of the solaris zone that is still not available and we don't have an ETA on that. I've seen the same thing happening for Harmony and I wonder if we are running out of resources for zones. I think it would be worthwhile for the board to have a clear understanding of the project zone situation. If/when the board has such understanding, it would be useful for it to be reported back to the projects asking for zones and currently on hold. [1] http://labs.apache.org/doapizer.html [2] http://labs.apache.org/ ----------------------------------------- Attachment I: Status report for the Apache Lucene Project TLP The Lucene project added one new PMC member, Sami Siren. LUCENE JAVA Lucene Java is a search-engine toolkit. Development was active, with over 60 Jira issues resolved. Several IBM employees have started contributing significantly this quarter, including one new committer, Michael McCandless. The website was ported to Forrest. NUTCH Nutch is a web-search engine: crawler, indexer and search runtime. Nutch made a 0.8.1 release in September. One new committer was added, Chris Mattmann. Development was active with over 50 issues resolved. HADOOP Hadoop is a scalable distributed computing platform. Its monthly release schedule has continued. Development has been very active, with over 200 issues resolved this quarter. Support has improved for Amazon's computing services, making it easier for folks to experiment without purchasing hundreds of machines. SOLR Solr is an enterprise search server, in incubation. Development is steady, with around 20 issues resolved this quarter. Solr now has committers from a variety of institutions and should soon graduate. LUCY Lucy will develop a shared C-based core for ports of Lucene to other languages, such as Perl, Python and Ruby. Some initial steps were made this quarter. LUCENE.NET Lucene.Net is an incubator project providing a C# port of Lucene. It still has only one active developer. ----------------------------------------- Attachment J: Status report for the Apache Portals Project ----------------------------------------- Attachment K: Status report for the Apache SpamAssassin Project - We won 'Best Linux-based Anti-spam Solution' at the Linux New Media Awards 2006, winning 69% of the vote! - SpamAssassin 3.1.6 was released in October, swiftly followed by a quick-fix 3.1.7 release -- we're allowed one brown-bag moment per stable release branch ;) - SpamAssassin 3.2.0 is rapidly nearing release -- we're getting to the stage where we could start performing the time-consuming score-generation process with the current code and ruleset. We'll probably do this in January (although haven't yet put it to a vote...) - we added ASF member Tony Finch as a committer. - no change to the PMC composition. ----------------------------------------- Attachment L: Status report for the Apache Tomcat Project Issues requiring the Board's attention: none. Development ------------------ Work continues apache on Tomcat 6 and the mod_jk connector. Both products have done multiple alpha- and beta-level releases since the last Board report. Both have received increased testing from the committers as well as outside contributors, resulting in some interesting issues discovered and addressed. We hope to have a stable mod_jk release, 1.2.20, in the next week or two, as well as another alpha-level build of Tomcat (6.0.6), and the first stable Tomcat 6 release before the next Board report. Several of the fixes found in Tomcat 6 have been back-ported to Tomcat 5.x as well, but there has been no 5.x release since 5.5.20 in September. Security ------------ On December 7th a possible security issue was reported to us by the Struts PMC, which had been notified of it earlier. After some discussion, we concluded this was a fairly minor issue with responsibility on both the Tomcat and Struts sides. There was a patch available in SVN within a day or so, and it was back-ported to previous Tomcat branches as well. I think we were all pretty pleased with the efficiency and speed of communication between the projects. Because the issue has yet to be publicly announced and this Board report may become public before the issue is announced, we are omitting the actual details here. The Tomcat PMC will be glad to provide any details required, and the discussions are archived on the mailing list archives of private@tomcat.apache.org, private@struts.apache.org, and security@tomcat.apache.org. Trademarks / Legal ---------------------------- A couple of days ago we noted that http://www.octazen.com/product_tomcatnet.html was calling their product Tomcat.NET. We contacted them, CCing the PRC for its records, and Octazen immediately agreed to relabel their product and clarify the page as to their relationship to Apache Tomcat. So this issue was resolved pleasantly and quickly. Community ---------------- Not much going on here: no new committers, no new PMC members, but no one resigning or leaving either ;) ----------------------------------------- Attachment M: Status report for the Apache Web Services Project - Axis C++ supports the generation of C stubs for Document/Literal style. Tested on OS/400. - The Apache Muse team released a new major version (2.0) on September 29th. Muse 2.0 offers an implementation of the latest ratified versions of WSRF, WSN, and WSDM, for both Axis2 and OSGi-based applications. The team is planning a 2.1 maintenance release for December 14th. - Axis2 released v1.1 on 13th November 2006 - Apache WSS4J released v1.5.1 on 11th December 2006 - Apache Rampart released v1.1 on 11th December 2006 - Synapse folks are working on a plan to exit incubation and join WS PMC - Axis2 may release a v1.1.1 next week. - Somewhat related note, Cliff sent out an email about Apache ODE's implementation of BPEL spec, indicating that we are good to go as there are no specific claims/patents we are aware of. ----------------------------------------- Attachment N: Status report for the Apache XMLBeans Project Development continues on the same trend, there was an upgrade to use the latest version of Saxon 8.8 for XPath/XQuery support in XMLBeans and a more flexible Schema generator and bug fixes related to xml saving, error handling of type system, dates and duration. Traffic on the mailing lists is at the same levels, though new users are asking questions, sometimes quite advanced. There were no new releases, though it's probably a good time to start thinking of a new minor release. There were no new committers or PMC changes. Status for XMLBeanscxx subproject: 1) 2 committers granted karma 2) initial code drop into ASF 3) some discussions w/ other Apache projects re: usage of xmlbeanscxx ----------------------------------------- Attachment O: Status report for the Apache Incubator Project Projects in the Incubator have been very busy. Tuscany, Qpid, Felix, CXF, Synapse, Yoko, OpenJPA and Abdera have all been going through Incubator releases in the past month. Cayenne and OFBiz are proposed to Board to move to TLP status. At least a couple of other projects should be getting ready to do so. No major conflicts in the past month. Just a lot of work. Reports are missing from ActiveMQ and log4php. ================== === ODE === Apache ODE is an implementation of the BPEL4WS and WS-BPEL specifications for web services orchestration. ODE entered incubation in March 2006. Activity related to incubation: * Thanks to Cliff Schmidt, we've finally cleared the BPEL4WS and WS-BPEL specifications intellectual property and patents issues. See http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-legal-discuss/200612.mbox/%3c90 6BAFB9-4176-42D8-B9D3-1ED05414FF6C@apache.org%3e for details. * We're almost finished replacing Hibernate with OpenJPA, Hibernate is our last license-related issue. Activity related to project development: * We've created a much better site at http://incubator.apache.org/ode. We still need to add more documentation but the principal is already there. * We've added a connector for JBI (ServiceMix) and another one with SCA (Tuscany) is in progress. * Development is still very active, we've added more features and also improved stability. To complete before graduation: * Now that most IP issues have been resolved we need to release. This will hopefully help us for the next point. * We need to attract more committers and encourage diversity. So the plan for the next period is to finish the transition to OpenJPA and build a release most probably in January. === OFBiz === Apache OFBiz ("The Apache Open For Business Project") is an open source enterprise automation software project.[[BR]] OFBiz entered incubation in January 2006. Top items to resolve before graduation: * the OFBiz community has completed all the incubation's tasks, the Incubator has positively voted for the graduation of OFBiz podling and the text of the the board resolution has been sent to the ASF Board. What has been done for incubation since the last report: * the Incubator vote has approved the Apache OFBiz 4.0.0 TS5 test snapshot release * the Incubator has positively voted for the graduation of OFBiz podling Plans and expectations for the next period * we are all hoping to get a positive vote for graduating OFBiz to a TLP during the next ASF Board meeting (happening on 20, December) * if OFBiz will graduate, we will work, together with the Infrastructure guys to the migration of mailing lists, issue tracker, svn server, web site See the Incubator status page (http://incubator.apache.org/projects/ofbiz.html) for more details. === log4net === log4net is an implementation of the Apache log4j for the .NET Framework. Incubating since: 2004-01-15 Items to complete before graduation: * Continue to expand the community Community: * User mailing list maintaining good activity * We have an open ended discussion on the use and storage of strong name assembly signing keys. This may need further discussion at wider level, and probably requires some sort of consensus amongst all the Apache .NET projects. Code: * No important development news to report. * The next planned release will be a point release fixing issues reported since the last release. * Several user contributed patches are waiting to be reviewed and integrated. === NMaven === NMaven develops plugins and integration for Maven to make building and using .NET languages a first-class citizen in Maven. Incubating since: 2006-11-17 This is the first report for this podling. Completed setup: * Mailing lists and ppmc established * SVN area set up * Software grant and CLA received, account created * Moved existing Maven sandbox code to the podling * Reach out to dev@maven.apache.org to look for additional contributors * Tidied up and imported NMaven code * Some discussion has started to take place about the best way forward Next steps: * start working on a roadmap and looking for further interest === Wicket === Web development framework focusing on pure OO coding, making the creation of new components very easy. Wicket entered the incubator in October 2006. Top three items to resolve * Get a Wicket site on http://incubator.apache.org/wicket * Make the code base license policy compliant * Settle into ASF context more Community aspects: * Development list gets more activity * Job listings are rising * Sister project http://wicket-stuff.sf.net becomes community driven Code aspects: * Work on 1.3 has started * Work continues steadily on 2.0 Licensing: * Removed LGPL date picker component from extensions (1.3 branch, 2.0 still todo) * Started to replace License headers in source files * Discussion on css/javascript/html file license headers. Wicket contains and distributes many (small) css, javascript and html files that are also downloaded to the browser. Point of dispute is the fact that the license is larger than several of the files, and that it increases the download sizes of resources for all users of Wicket applications. Infrastructure: * Work has started to generate the website using confluence === UIMA === UIMA is a component framework for the analysis of unstructured content such as text, audio and video. Things are proceeding well, there is a lot of activity on the dev list, a lot of coding activity. We're pretty much settled in with the Apache infrastructure, have figured out how we want to use Jira in conjunction with SVN etc. Some recent activity: * Infrastructure setup complete, barring some minor JIRA admin issues * Website in good shape now, using Anakia * Settled on Confluence for Wiki * M2 build done * Documentation has been converted to Doc``Book, although there are still some formatting issues to address * Sample code has been updated * Moving known issues from previous issue tracking systems to Jira * Created sandbox as a place to contribute UIMA analysis components, tooling * We've posted messages at the previous UIMA download locations notifying our user base that development has moved to the ASF incubator Our priorities for the coming weeks: * We are hoping to be able to do our first Apache incubator release early next year. There is a __lot__ of work to be done to make that happen, and we're still in the process of figuring out what that work is exactly ;-) * Get the sandbox off to a running start * Discuss ways to attract new committers === Woden === Woden is a Java class library for reading, validating, manipulating, creating and writing WSDL documents, initially to support WSDL 2.0 and with the longer term aim of supporting past, present and future versions of WSDL. Woden entered the Incubator in April 2005. The Woden team have made six releases since then and have been included in the release of the Apache Axis2 project. Our current set of active committers consists of four from IBM, one from WSO2 and one from University of Moratuwa. If there are any concerns on whether we would graduate if a vote was put to the Incubator PMC, then it is diversity of the committer base. We would appreciate feedback on this point. Recent activity since our last report in August: * Woden M6 was released in October which introduced a StAX parser based implementation of the Woden API and improved the compliance with the WSDL 2.0 specification. * In November, three of the Woden committers attended the W3C Web Services Description Working Group "Second Interoperability Event on WSDL 2.0" in Dinard, France. Two others participated remotely. Some highlights of the event: * Fixed numerous Woden bugs, * Added a number of good test cases, * Conducted a message exchange testing, * Identified a number of ambiguities and potential issudes in * Generally ate too much :-) * In Novermber, we added one more committer, Graham Turrell, subsequent to his contribution of significant patches in the area of a URI resolution framework. * Woden M6 jar has been included in the Axis2 1.1 release. * We have a healthy dev list with a large increase in activity recently. * Woden has made progress lately wrt conformance to the WSDL 2.0 spec, which can be seen in the WSDL working group's dashboard [1] Our immediate priorities are: * deliver M7 to rollup the significant progress made during the interop event. * continue development of Woden extension mechanism so that specifications that extend the core WSDL spec can extend Woden to parse and validate their extensions. [1] http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/~checkout~/2002/ws/desc/test-suite/Dashboard.html === OpenEJB === OpenEJB is an open source, modular, configurable, and extendable EJB Container System and EJB Server. Incubating since: 2006-07-10 Additions to the PPMC: David Blevins, David Jencks Additions to the committer roster: Rick McGuire, Mohammed Nour (not yet processed) All remaining infra has been migrated to ASF hardware: * JIRA * Confluence * Website As hoped the JIRA migration tool we created has helped other Incubator projects migrate as well, most recently Ivy. All IP was cleared. Recent new contributors: Manu George and Filippo Diotalevi contributed their first patches. Recent activity has centered around producing a 2.2-incubating release. The spread of workload and commitment to getting all of the process right (including updates to the source headers) was very encouraging. A vote was held, and recently passed, including the 3 binding votes from the incubator PMC (by the mentors of the podling). === OpenJPA === OpenJPA made good progress this quarter. The community completed its first release (0.9.6) under guidance from the Incubator PMC and the Mentors. This took a couple of attempts and was a good learning experience for all involved. Two new committers were added (Bryan Noll and Srinivasa Segu). The project has completed requisite IP clearance steps and updated its status / website. Now, the focus is on growing and diversifying the community. === Cayenne === Apache Cayenne is component-oriented persistence framework, providing object-relational mapping (ORM), remoting services, and a JPA-compatible persistence provider (JSR-220). Cayenne entered incubation in March 2006. Top items to resolve before graduation: * The Cayenne community has completed all incubator tasks, the Incubator has voted for the graduation of the Apache Cayenne podling, and the text of the board resolution has been sent to the ASF Board. What has been done for incubation since the last report: * We rewrote remaining code (originally by Gary Jarrel) to finish out IP issues. * We released Apache Cayenne 2.0.1. * We added Tore Halset as a Cayenne PPMC member. * We added Malcolm Edgar as as Cayenne committer. * We worked through the graduation process and the Incubator PMC has voted to recommend Cayenne for graduation to the ASF Board. Plans and expectations for the next period * We expect to graduate Cayenne to a TLP during the December 20th ASF Board meeting. === ADF Faces / Trinidad === Apache Trinidad is a library of JavaServer Faces components, runnable with every JSF-compliant implementation. The Trinidad (ADF Faces) project solved lot's of todos. We also worked on lot's of jira issue, like: * Improving the client side validation * Moving some internal classes to API * cleanup of notices and licenses for compliance with the ASF * improved PDA support (got patches from users here) * JSF 1.2 compliant One of the biggest technical working points these days is the JSF 1.2 branch to be compliant against a JSF 1.2 impl. One of the artifacts (the maven plugins) is currently used by the MyFaces team to work on their JSF 1.2 impl. We added a new committer to the project. === mod_ftp === mod_ftp is an FTP protocol module for Apache 2.0 and 2.2. Incubating since: 2005-08-06 Mentor: Jim Jagielski Additions to the PPMC: None Additions to the committer roster: None Recent activity has been around tying up the loose ends for graduation. Also significant work has been done in porting to the latest rev of APR, to allow for building against 2.2. More work is required on this front, but this should not affect graduation. Documentation has undergone serious improvement, both in the form of normal httpd server docs as well as traditional README-type docs. ----------------------------------------- Attachment P: Status report for the Conferences Committee [ delivered to the Board on November 15, 2006 ] ApacheCon US took place in Austin, Texas this year from October 9-13. The first two days were devoted to tutorials and the last three to conference sessions. There were 5 concurrent tracks of one-hour sessions during the conference proper, with a 6th track on the last day for business-oriented content. There some problems with marketing so the sponsor participation was lighter than anticipated. Nevertheless, the conference should turn a slight profit (awaiting final numbers from SCP). IBM was a sponsor, this time with involvement from a high-enough level within the company that there's hope for some continuity rather than being at the mercy of individual department budgets and plans. There were approximately 500 people in attendance, including a large influx from the local area. The traditional 'hackathon' occurred on the two tutorial days. For the remainder of the week, the hackathon area remained available, and was directly adjacent to the exhibit area. Since the tables all had power, they were frequently in use, and often by people collaborating rather than just individuals. The Apache Geronimo project, for example, had a number of people sharing a table almost continuously. There was no hard network available, only wifi, but that didn't seem to be an issue for anyone. On the second day of the tutorials, an 802.11a network was set up, which had a surprising number of people using it. This conference makes the second the ASF has done with this producer. The ASF has entered into a three-year contract with them for all U.S. and European conferences. The next full ApacheCon will be in Amsterdam at the end of April 2007; the site and dates for the next U.S. ApacheCon have not yet been determined. The growth in attendee numbers is essentially flat, although there were problems with the marketing for Austin. With a longer-term relationship with the producer assured, the conference is expected to become steadily more 'reliable' in terms of travel and education planning, and the attendance is expected to grow gradually. ----------------------------------------- Attachment Q: Status report for the Apache Velocity Project General information ------------------- The Velocity project is busy moving out of the Jakarta umbrella and into top-level status. Since the last report we have successfully moved the SVN repository with the help of infrastructure and also set up a commits mailing list. For the TLP itself we are in process of setting up a web site which then links all the project web sites together. This should be done till the end of December. The Velocity project currently has no board-level issues at this time. New Committers / PMC members ---------------------------- Claude Brisson was voted in as a committer to the Velocity Tools project (and in turn to the Velocity project as a whole) on Dec, 1st. His CLA has been sent in and recorded. No new PMC members were voted in since the last board report. Velocity Engine project ----------------------- The Velocity engine project voted and released 1.5-beta2 on November 24th. According to the discussion on the infrastructure mailing list, we moved this beta release together with all other voted beta releases (currently only 1.5 beta1) into the mirrored distribution tree at www.apache.org/dist/velocity/ The engine project fully expects to keep its early Q1 '07 release date. Velocity Tools project ---------------------- Velocity Tools is gearing up towards the 1.3 release. No beta or final releases were made since the last board report. Velocity DVSL ------------- There were no changes in the DVSL code base. No DVSL development happened in the last month. ------------------------------------------------------ End of minutes for the December 20, 2006 board meeting.