The Apache Software Foundation Board of Directors Meeting Minutes August 20, 2003 1. Call to order The meeting was scheduled for 10am PDT -0700. A sufficient attendance to constitute a quorum was recognized by the chairman at 10:04am, at which point the meeting was called to order. The meeting was held by teleconference hosted by Jim Jagielski. IRC #asfboard on irc.freenode.net was used for backup purposes. 2. Roll Call Directors Present: Brian Behlendorf Ken Coar Mark Cox Roy T. Fielding Jim Jagielski Sam Ruby Greg Stein Directors Absent: Ben Laurie Dirk-Willem van Gulik Guests: none 3. Minutes and supplements from previous meetings A. The meeting of February 19, 2003 Minutes are not yet available for approval. [Sam Ruby] B. The meeting of February 26, 2003 Minutes are not yet available for approval. [Sam Ruby] C. The meeting of July 16, 2003 board_minutes_2003_07_16.txt in cvs.apache.org:/home/cvs board were approved by general consent. 4. Officer Reports A. Chairman [Greg] Greg reported that the big news was the launch of the J2EE/Geronomi project under the Incubator. There was significant interest in the project and a lot of good work had already been done. Greg reported that there was also some good discussion regarding members' roles in the foundation. B. President [Dirk] No report. C. Treasurer [Chuck] No report. D. Exec. V.P. and Secretary [Jim] Jim reported that he is digging out from vacation and bringing the status of signed CLAs up to date. Jim noted that we were getting close to the time when the next payment to United Layer would be due and reminded the board that payment required him to co-sign the check, due to the amount of the check. This sparked discussion regarding the best way to accomplish this, such as auto-deductions from the ASF account. It was decided that raising the limit before co-signing was required was the way to go. Jim was to contact Chuck regarding getting this implemented. 5. Committee Reports A. Apache Ant Project [Conor MacNeill] See Attachment A The Apache Ant Project Status Report was accepted as submitted and written by general consent. B. Apache HTTP Server Project [Sander Striker] See Attachment B The Apache HTTP Server Project Status Report was accepted as submitted and written by general consent. C. Apache Perl Project [Doug MacEachern] See Attachment C No report was received. This sparked discussion regarding the current status of the Apache Perl Project. Greg was to contact Doug regarding the project's status and Doug's present involvement with the project. D. Apache XML Project [Berin Lautenbach] See Attachment D The report sparked discussion regarding the distribution of encryption code and hooks within ASF projects. Jim reminded the board of the legal opinion obtained by the HTTP Server Project back in September 2000 from McGlashan & Sarrail. Jim was to scan and commit the summary findings. Mark was to provide some background information as well. The Apache XML Project Status Report was accepted as submitted and written by general consent. E. Apache Cocoon Project [Steven Noels] See Attachment E The Apache Cocoon Project Status Report was accepted as submitted and written by general consent. F. Fund-raising Committee [Chuck Murcko] See Attachment F No report was received. 6. Special Orders It was noted that Greg was awaiting a resolution from the Apache DB Project regarding the project. 7. Unfinished Business 8. New Business It was desired that the Conferences Committee chair be empowered to change the composition of the committee without requiring ratification by the board. Jim noted that the Conferences Committee was actually a PMC and not a Board Committee, so the chair already has this capability. There was discussion regarding the chair postion for the Apache Incubator and the Apache Commons projects. Both current chairs (Jim and Ken, respectively) have offered to step down. Despite suggested replacements, interest in each project to select/elect new chairs was minimal at best. It was noted that it was requested within the Incubator project that Jim stay on "for a bit" while the level of activity within the Incubator was still high. It was decided that maybe it was time anyway. Both Jim and Ken were to try to reboot the "new chair" efforts in their respective projects. 9. Announcements 10. Adjournment Scheduled to adjourn by 11:30 PDT -0700. Adjourned at 11:14. ============ ATTACHMENTS: ============ ----------------------------------------- Attachment A: Status report for the Apache Ant Project o Ant 1.5.3-1 This was a supplementary release made on April 16th. There was no functional change. from Ant 1.5.3 - it just removed a copy of junit.jar which had inadvertently been included in the Ant 1.5.3 build. o Ant 1.5.4 This is scheduled for release in the next week. It addresses just two particular problems - the change to the javah entry point in the latest JDK release and the Visual Age tasks. The latter, being only compatible with JDK 1.1, were included to give users of this task a working release prior to the Ant 1.6 release which depends on JDK 1.2+ o Ant 1.6 Ant 1.6 is the current development codebase (CVS head). There is no timeframe yet on this release. o ant.apache.org site The Ant site now includes the project bylaws. o Legal Issues None. o New committers A new committer Peter Reilly has been added to the project and is making valuable contributions to the operation of the Ant core. o Community No issues. ----------------------------------------- Attachment B: Status report for the Apache HTTP Server Project The PMC's membership was expanded with 5 the last three months. The committership is active and sustaining continued code improvements. There have been several releases, both for the 1.3 and the 2.0 line. Security releases have outnumbered the regular releases and caused some concerns about the release process. Last quarter has been relatively slow when it comes to developments specific to the 2.1 tree. A record high market share for the HTTP Server of almost 64% was hit this month. All is well in HTTP Server land. ----------------------------------------- Attachment C: Status report for the Apache Perl Project ----------------------------------------- Attachment D: Status report for the Apache XML Project -- General Comments -- We've had a quarter with a fair bit of general activity. The XMLBeans product has been accepted into incubation by the project as a whole. The proposal generated a great level of discussion amongst the xml project community, and ended in a positive result, with a clear understanding of what issues the xml community feel need to be addressed during the incubation process. -- PMC -- The PMC has updated the charter document, and is going through a vote process to formalise this new version. This will hopefully be completed in the next few weeks. Christian Geuer-Pollmann retired from the PMC and a replacement has been nominated from the xml-security project (yet to be voted on within the PMC). ..................................................................... Issues needing attention: -- Legal -- The xml-security sub-project is starting work on C++ and Java implementations of the W3C XML Encryption standard. Whilst not implementing encryption algorithms directly, we will be making use of other libraries that have such functionality. After discussions with various parties within Apache, the xml-security team understands that working on such an implementation will not cause any export issues provided : * Only source code is released (i.e. no compiled versions of the libraries can be made available). * An e-mail is sent to Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) informing them of the location of the code available for download. The format of this email can be found at http://www.bxa.doc.gov/encryption/PubAvailEncSourceCodeNofify.html We seek the endorsement of the board for this approach, and would ask who such an e-mail should come from. -- Technical -- xml.apache.org projects need to take advantage of the ASF mirroring system. This will become more important as the infrastructure team begins moving services to our new server. The project is currently putting a plan together to do this over the next few months. ..................................................................... -- Axkit -- We recently released AxKit 1.6.2 (which included uploading a signed tarball to apache.org's servers ). This was a minor bug fix release, including features to "do the right thing" with external resources (such as file metadata) stored in non-utf-8 encodings, and adds attribute-value-templates to XSP. We have also added a unit test suite (thanks to Kip Hampton for finally taking the stand to do this) and it now runs nightly on axkit.org as a smoke test for new developments. Further work still goes into AxKit 2.0 (which will work only on Apache 2.0), and we expect a 1.6.3 release to be not too far around the corner due to a couple of important bug fixes in CVS. We also gained a new committer, Mike Chamberlain, who is working mostly on AxKit 2.0 now. -- Batik -- The Batik project had a release in July just prior to the SVG Open conference in Vancouver. The release came with a fairly large number of bug fixes, improvements and a lot of work on the test infrastructure. We will likely do a patch release in September as there have been a couple important improvements done by Thomas DeWeese? after the release and there are a few regressions to patch. -- Commons -- The xml-commons project has made slow and quiet progress. The Xalan-J and Xerces-J committers are collaborating on the xml-apis code to maintain a branch that can be used to pass the JAXP 1.2 TCK for their projects. We hope to make new maintenance releases soon of both the resolver and which utilities, which just need some docs/release manager volunteer time. - ShaneCurcuru -- FOP -- There was a FOP release, 0.20.5 in July which has a few improvements and bugfixes. This release is intended to be the last release from the maintenance code branch. Unfortunately, progress on the main code branch is very slow. The distribution directory has been migrated to the new location to make the downloads mirrorable. -- Forrest -- Forrest has been quietly progressing over the last few months. We hope to make a 0.5 release soon, and not before time since 0.4 was back in February. We have voted in 2 new committers. In addition, all Cocoon developers have been granted commit access, reflecting strong cross-project ties. No new dependencies or legal issues. -- Xalan-C++ -- Xalan-C 1.6 was released on 11 August. Highlights include: * "Sane includes" changes. * Bug fixes. * FreeBSD and NetBSD? ports * Faster UTF-8 and UTF-16 serializers. -- Xalan-J/XSLTC -- Xalan-J 2.5.1 was released in early June. The release included: * documentation updates and bug fixes (see http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/readme.html) * performance patches to the serializer and to XSLTC * An alternate binary distribution which contains XSLTC and Xalan-Interpretive in separate jar files. See: http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/downloads.html for more information on the packaging in the two distributions. A great deal of effort in the quarter was spent improving performance for the 2.5.1 release and beyond in the current version in CVS. The improvement has been noted by some of our users, which means that it is often more than a few percent. Finally, one new committer, Igor Hersht, was accepted into the subproject. -- Xerces-C++ -- Good progress being made. 2.4.0 planned for release in the autumn with new features including persistent grammars. No new committers. -- Xerces-J -- Xerces-J 2.5.0 was released in late July. As well as the usual plethora of bugfixes, this release marked the completion of Xerces-J's PSVI/XML Schema Component Model support via implementation of annotation components. The product was also upgraded to conform to the latest DOM level 3 Core and Load/Save? Working Drafts, and an experimental XInclude partial implementation was added. Finally, one new committer--K Venugopal--was accepted into the subproject. -- Xerces-P -- Xerces-P made an experimental 2.3 release. This included support for handling the config.status file of Xerces-C to improve cross platform support. Two announcements were made from users who successfully compiled the 2.3 release under Windows, however no binary release for windows is available yet. -- Xindice -- Xindice is still trying to put together the 1.1 release, so far with mixed results and a couple of failed attempts. The good news is that the community has got two new committers: Vadim Gritsenko and Kevin O'Neill joined Xindice in late July, and results are encouraging, with discussions and CVS commits flowing at a very good rate. -- XML-Security -- The XML-Security sub-project has just release version 1.0.0 of the C++ library, supporting the W3C XML Digital Signature standard. Work will now move to creating a C++ implementation of the XML Encryption standard. Work continues in the Java library to further develop encryption support. There has also been a fair amount of discussion around the potential legal ramifications for Apache of releasing a library that makes use of encryption algorithms. (See legal issues above.) ----------------------------------------- Attachment E: Status report for the Apache Cocoon Project Here's the report on Cocoon's state of affairs. We do hope this gives the board a feeling on how we are doing. Let's first start with a brief run-through of the previous report (http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=xml-cocoon-dev&m=105344074224116&w=2) and see how we proceed: 1), 2), 3): no further action required or taken 4) recursive Cocoon charter: still needs to be worked upon 5) use of Cocoon brand by cocoondev.org and cocooncenter.com: ditto 6) ditto - work is slowly progressing with the infrastructure team to migrate the Cocoon wiki to ASF infrastructure, together with Steven Noels and Gianugo Rabellino from the Cocoon team - we believe it is fair to indicate that an ASF-operated shared and managed Java hosting service might accelerate this, and do hope the eventual migration of our Wiki might serve as an example to move further along that road. 7) solved: the XMLForms effort is being actively deprecated in favor of other form handling frameworks (JXForms and Woody). 8) transfer of HSSF (Excel) serializer from Cocoon -> POI: no further action has been taken yet. 9) Avalon Excalibur dependencies: Cocoon committers have now commit karma to an Avalon CVS module that hosts code in heavy use by the Cocoon project, making sure bugs can be fixed and patches applied in due time. 10) the Milestone release scheme has been applied successfully, and has resulted in a 2.1 release mid August. 11) Lenya incubation is still ongoing and monitored by the Cocoon PMC. 12), 13), 14): satisfactory ongoing. New matter: 1) The Cocoon project has released a 2.1 version mid of August, and work is under its way to release a forthcoming 2.1.1 quickfix release. 2) Discussions are starting on the upcoming 2.2 development. 3) Most notable discussion was about the existence (and/or creation) of several overlapping ideas and frameworks for flow and form handling inside Cocoon, and even though the discussions were lenghty, at the verge of being flame-infested, the main discussion participants came to an agreement, showing off the maturity of the Cocoon community even when starting off from a discours of extreme technical dissonance. 4) As a result of all this, work is under its way to refactor and augment specific form handling code (Woody) into a truly community-owned artefact, and API changes have been allowed to make sure specific implementations (JS Flow with Continuations) leave room for alternatives, should the community see fit. 5) Several new committers since the previous report: Ugo Cei, Marc Portier, Guido Casper, Reinhard Pötz, Upayavira and Joerg Heinicke. There's a de facto policy that all committers can subscribe to the PMC list, but formalization of this, and whether this means they can cast a binding PMC vote still needs to be discussed. There's a certain tendency that there should be no distinction between active committership and PMC membership. Lenya hasn't signed up any new committers since it went into incubation, yet. 6) The Cocoon project guidelines and revised charter are under construction, being based on a de-formalized branch of the Jakarta ones. Overall, the Cocoon project is a healthy and friendly community working along the Apache spirit, and we expect no sudden problems to emerge. ----------------------------------------- Attachment F: Status report for the Fund-raising Committee __________________________________________________________ End of minutes for the 20 August 2003 board meeting.