The Apache Software Foundation Board of Directors Meeting Minutes February 15, 2006 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 by teleconference, hosted by Jim Jagielski and Covalent. IRC #asfboard on irc.freenode.net was used for backup purposes. 2. Roll Call Directors Present: Ken Coar Justin Erenkrantz Dirk-Willem van Gulik (arrived 10:21 am) Jim Jagielski Sam Ruby Greg Stein Sander Striker Directors Absent: Ben Laurie Stefano Mazzocchi Guests: Erik Abele (arrived 10:16 am) 3. Minutes from previous meetings Minutes in Subversion are found under the URL: https://svn.apache.org/repos/private/foundation/board/ Append the minutes URIs to that to access them through the Web. A. The meeting of July 28, 2005 SVN - board/board_minutes_2005_07_28.txt Approved as amended by General Consent. B. The meeting of December 21, 2005 SVN - board/board_minutes_2005_12_21.txt Approved by General Consent. C. The meeting of January 18, 2006 SVN - board/board_minutes_2006_01_18.txt Tabled. 4. Officer Reports A. Chairman [Greg] Greg reported that in general the board has been quiet, as have any ASF issues which may require board attention. It was noted that some issues, such as the mandate of the PRC, as well as the operation and health of the Geronimo and Incubator PMCs have been "pushed down" to the PMC and member level, since they do not, as yet, require direct board action. B. President [Sander] Progress is being made on the OSUOSL front. I have received a concept contract, and have sent an NDA for them to sign. The final Xserve was brought into the SURFnet colo facility. Due to a miscommunication it doesn't have any connectivity yet. This will be resolved next week. There was hardware purchased (a network switch, network cables, and an external storage unit), totalling at roughly $1,000.00. Another drive has failed in minotaurs RAID array. We are looking into purchasing a couple of replacement drives, to guarantee the safety of our data, and the continueity of operation of our Subversion installation. Our JIRA installation (one of our issue trackers), is continueing to give grief to the maintainers. Atlassian is looking into sponsoring either new parts or a new machine, to move it to a dedicated issue tracker machine. Ajax, our Itanium machine in Amsterdam, is going to be upgraded to a different OS. A test was performed whether the hardware would be recognized correctly. As soon as the external storage unit is in place, the upgrade can be performed. This will be done remotely. It is expected that all I/O problems that we have been experiencing will be solved afterwards. Helios, hosting our so-called zones, is being used quite a lot. Most projects have requested their own zone and are putting it to use. At some point limits will have to put on the amount of resources a zone can use. This is currently not a concern. The fact that the zones are being used as a production service is of some concern, given that it is still an experimental service. No backups are currently being performed, nor is uptime guaranteed. The Security Team has sent in a report noting that it is close to impossible for volunteers to pick up reported security issues, file them, and dispatch them to the correct party, and also checking if the issue is actually being resolved. In the Public Relations committee I hear a similar message, but regarding PR issues. C. Treasurer [Justin] Reimbursements from ApacheCon 2005 US hardship cases are still in process with IBM. I have been informed that the Summer of Code payment from Google is forthcoming as well as the payment from FCP for ApacheCon US 2005. I have provided a list of past donors to the PRC to help them bootstrap a sponsorship program. I am overdue on coordinating with Jim to process our roughly 40 thank you letters for donations over $250 made during the last calendar year. Current Balances as of 2/14/2006: Paypal $ 1,383.17 (+$ 434.16) Checking $21,338.94 (-$ 2,030.23) Savings $170,080.24 (+$ 292.98) Total $192,802.35 (-$ 1,303.09) D. Exec. V.P. and Secretary [Jim] As of today's date, I have not heard back from St. Pauls/ Travelers regarding our D&O Insurance policy application. I contacted them at the top of the month, and the application is still being worked on in underwriting; the delay has no negative or postive connotation. The Email list for the "Bylaws Recommendation" group was created, and discussions have commenced. It is hoped that a report can be made at the next board meeting. Other than the traditional influx of iCLAs, CCLAs and software grants, no items or notices have been received at the ASF office requiring board attention. 5. Committee Reports A. Apache Ant Project [Conor MacNeill / Justin] See Attachment A Approved by General Consent. B. Apache Cocoon Project [Sylvain Wallez / Stefano] See Attachment B Approved by General Consent. C. Apache Forrest Project [David Crossley / Dirk] See Attachment C Approved by General Consent. D. Apache HTTP Server Project [Roy T. Fielding / Ben] See Attachment D Approved by General Consent. E. Apache Lenya Project [Gregor J. Rothfuss / Sander] See Attachment E Approved by General Consent. F. Apache Logging Project [Mark Womack / Jim] See Attachment F A review of what was submitted in January was provided. No additional information was provided nor required. Approved by General Consent. G. Apache Perl Project [Geoffrey Young / Ken] See Attachment G Approved by General Consent. H. Apache Xalan Project [Brian Minchau / Sam] See Attachment H Approved by General Consent. I. Apache Xerces Project [Gareth Reakes / Greg] See Attachment I Approved by General Consent. J. Apache XML Project [Gianugo Rabellino / Dirk] See Attachment J Approved by General Consent. K. Apache XML Graphics Project [Jeremias Maerki / Greg] See Attachment K Approved by General Consent. L. Public Relations Committee [Brian W. Fitzpatrick / Sander] See Attachment L Approved by General Consent. M. Apache / Java Community Process [Geir Magnusson Jr. / Jim] See Attachment M No Report filed. N. Security Team [Ben Laurie] See Attachment N Approved by General Consent. 6. Special Orders A. Establish the Apache Tapestry 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 implementation of the Tapestry Web Application Framework, for distribution at no charge to the public. NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that a Project Management Committee (PMC), to be known as the "Tapestry PMC", be and hereby is established pursuant to Bylaws of the Foundation; and be it further RESOLVED, that the Tapestry PMC be and hereby is responsible for the creation and maintenance of software related to creation and maintenance of open-source software and documentation related to the Tapestry Web Application Framework based on software licensed to the Foundation; and be it further RESOLVED, that the office of "Vice President, Tapestry" 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 Tapestry PMC, and to have primary responsibility for management of the projects within the scope of responsibility of the Tapestry PMC; and be it further RESOLVED, that the persons listed immediately below be and hereby are appointed to serve as the initial members of the Tapestry PMC: * Howard M. Lewis Ship (hlship@apache.org) * Geoffrey Longman (glongman@gmail.com) * Kent Tong (freemant2000 at yahoo dot com) * David Solis (dsolis@gmail.com) * Jesse Kuhnert (jkuhnert@gmail.com) * Paul Ferraro (pferraro@apache.org) * Richard Lewis-Shell (rlewisshell@gmail.com) * Mind Bridge (mindbridgeweb@yahoo.com) * Tsvetelin Saykov (tsvetelin.saykov@gmail.com) NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Howard Lewis Ship be appointed to the office of Vice President, Tapestry, 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 Tapestry PMC be and hereby is tasked with the creation of a set of bylaws intended to encourage open development and increased participation in the Tapestry Project; and be it further RESOLVED, that the initial Tapestry PMC be and hereby is tasked with the migration and rationalization of the Apache Jakarta PMC Tapestry subproject; and be it further RESOLVED, that all responsibility pertaining to the Jakarta Tapestry sub-project and encumbered upon the Apache Jakarta PMC are hereafter discharged. Resolution 6A, Establish the Apache Tapestry Project, was approved by Unanimous Vote. 7. Discussion Items None. 8. Review of Current Action Items 9. Unfinished Business None. 10. New Business None. 11. Announcements None. 12. Adjournment Scheduled to adjourn by 12:00 (Pacific). Adjourned at 11:09am. ============ ATTACHMENTS: ============ ----------------------------------------- Attachment A: Status report for the Apache Ant Project o Current Release Ant 1.6.5 is the current release and was released on June 2, 2005. There have been no releases since the previous board report. o Ant 1.7 Still in development in svn trunk. No release scheduled at this time. o Antlibs Subproject The following Antlib projects were moved from the Sandbox to the main Antlib repository following successful votes on the ant-dev list. SVN Antlib - SVN related tasks AntUnit Antlib - A Junit style test framework for testing Ant tasks The .NET Antlib passed but only just with sufficient interest. o Legal Issues None. o PMC/Committers We have recently added Kevin Jackson as a sommitter. Kevin has been a long standing patch provider doing significant clean up work on the Ant codebase. o Community Community is healthy - no issues. ----------------------------------------- Attachment B: Status report for the Apache Cocoon Project Community: - Cocoon 2.1.8 was released in November, more than 6 months after the previous release. We want to have shorter release cycles and are planning to release 2.1.9 soon. - Some heavy work was done to use Maven 2 to build trunk (version 2.2). This is a really important effort, and the Maven guys were very responsive when we encountered some problems. - 1 new committer: Jean-Baptiste Quenot - PMC: Jean-Baptiste Quenot joined, Tony Collen left. Legal: - Big issue with Rhino: the recent draft licenising policy states that NPL is a prohibited licence, meaning we should remove Rhino from Cocoon distributions. This means removing a large amount of code and some very important features that make the value of Cocoon (i.e. flowscript and server-side scripting of form handling) - We have some concerns regarding the licencing terms of the JCR (aka JSR-170) API. Although Jackrabbit is ASL, the only distribution of the API we found uses a specific licence (http://www.day.com/maven/jsr170/licenses/day-spec-license.htm). The folks at Day software, leaders of this specification, clearly stated that it is meant to be available to the widest possible audience, but we need clearer licensing terms. ----------------------------------------- Attachment C: Status report for the Apache Forrest Project Issues needing board attention ------------------------------ Dirk, as our shepherd, made some useful notes on our last board report. As it takes such a long time for the minutes to become public at http://www.apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html is it okay for me to pass on Dirk's comments as-is to our private pmc list or do i need to paraphrase it? I would prefer to follow up with issues on our dev list rather than our pmc list. Changes in the PMC membership ----------------------------- No new committers/PMC members. General status -------------- * The development community is healthy. * Thanks to Antonio Gallardo and Ross Gardler who are now ASF members. Issues still to be dealt with by the Forrest PMC ------------------------------------------------ * Continue our project guidelines document. Been making links to various email discussions about how to deal with new development (when to branch). Need to get that into words. * Need to read up about how other projects deal with PMC members becoming emeritus and then define a policy. Progress of the project ----------------------- * No release date has yet been set for 0.8 although our move to fully utilising the locationmap internally is almost complete, and so the release is likely to be soon. That is what we said in our last board report, but yes we are making good progress. * Strong progress has been made on the new Dispatcher system. This is the Structurer and Themer to build a reliable common structure for documents, incorporate other content and provide hooks for applying themes. Soon to move it into the core plugins. * forrest.zones.apache.org (see details of usage in our last board report). Since then we have one more committer become active on the zone. That helps with the admin load. * Forrest Friday. Our monthly get together on IRC are getting even better. See details in last month's board report about logs and summaries, together with the comments from Dirk. The techniques are functioning well. Yes we need to improve on IRC nicknames matching up with committer IDs. Some committers use "cloaks" to declare their ASF ID. We need to encourage more. See forrest.apache.org/forrest-friday.html ----------------------------------------- Attachment D: Status report for the Apache HTTP Server Project The Apache HTTP server project has had a very active quarter in which multiple products were released for GA. We have one board-level issue at this time, which I will describe at the end of this report. We are stretching at the seams in terms of oversight of our subprojects and need to move some of them to peer projects or reorganize for better management of subproject releases. Our developer guidelines and ABOUT_APACHE documentation are still woefully out of date. We also need to figure out how multiple protocol modules fit with the name of our project, perhaps by changing our name or creating a federation (if I ever find the time to propose such a thing). During this quarter, we welcomed four new PMC members, including Colm MacCárthaigh, Maxime Petazzoni, Rüdiger Plüm, and Graham Leggett, while David Reid and Cliff Woolley have stepped out to emeritus status. We have also added several committers to subprojects, including Noirin Plunkett (docs), Philip M. Gollucci (apreq), Garrett Rooney, Graham Dumpleton (mod_python), and Rian Hunter (mod_smtpd). We also successfully released httpd 2.2.0 (GA), our first major release in five years. However, we hit a bit of a lull after ApacheCon and the holidays -- hopefully some energy will return soon, since each of the 1.3.x, 2.0.x, and 2.2.x branches are due for bug fix releases real soon. Work on the unstable branches has so far focused on revamping access control (again) and experimenting with asynchronous I/O. The docs group did a tremendous amount of work surrounding the 2.2.0 release, and now seems to have reached a steady-state. The mod_mbox module has been placed into service as the new ASF mail archives, and eating our own dogfood has revealed a number of problems that have been just as quickly fixed. We almost released mod_mbox, but are still working on its build scripts. The mod_smtp module has continued in development with several refactorings of the code. The mod_python subproject released a 3.2.7 as GA, their first GA release in almost two years. Credit for that release goes to Grisha Trubetskoy, Jim Gallacher, Graham Dumpleton, Nicolas Lehuen and everyone else who contributed on the python-dev mailing list. The group is currently working on improving the mod_python web site. The mod_python core group includes four independent contributors, but only one (Grisha) is on the HTTP server PMC. We should fix that soon, either by adding them to the PMC or by creating a separate project for mod_python. The apreq subproject has accomplished a major new release with libapreq-2.07, guided out the door by Joe Schaefer. I would like to see libapreq integrated directly into the httpd release branches and the main dev list, but that is a topic for next quarter. The httpd-test subproject has completed its move back to the perl.apache.org realm. However, we are left with the flood tool, which remains in stasis and should probably be archived or moved into incubator. The cli-dev subproject is at a crossroads. There hasn't been any significant development conversations for over a year, no sign of outside contributions beyond user requests for help, and I am personally -1 for adding a single-platform module to httpd whose sole purpose is to provide a proxy-like interface to Microsoft's proprietary application tools. I asked for advice on what to do about this on the PMC list on January 20th, but I am unable to fairly deal with this project given that I am currently involved as an expert in a patent dispute regarding ASP. Therefore, I would like to ask the board to decide the issue or assign this task to someone else (perhaps one of the board members that are also on the HTTP server PMC) so that I can cease worrying about it. ----------------------------------------- Attachment E: Status report for the Apache Lenya Project Community No new releases this quarter, which towards the end of the quarter led to the election of a new RM (Antonio Gallardo) and a discussion about the best way to handle release duties, and several people volunteered to do releases in the future until Antonio stepped up as a new RM. We also added one new commiter, Felix Roethenbacher. Several new users are standing out with their contributions to the Wiki and code discussions. Code A lot of work went into better integration of Jackrabbitt and breaking up the trunk code base into modules. We also added support for OpenDocument, improved WebDAV support, added a Wiki module and added another editor option, FckEditor. Our zone also received a fair amount of attention and now has nightly documentation drafts and nightly updated demo sites for both trunk and the 1.2x branch. Legal No open issues. ----------------------------------------- Attachment F: Status report for the Apache Logging Project [ Provided in January ] ----------------------------------------- Attachment G: Status report for the Apache Perl Project -- mod_perl 1.0 -- The mod_perl 1.x is a maintenance track designed to work with httpd 1.3.x. Nothing much happening on that track. No new mod_perl 1.x releases since the last report. --- mod_perl 2.0 -- mod_perl 2.X is designed to work with all httpd 2.X branches. no new mod_perl 2.x releases since the last report --- Apache-Test -- Apache-Test provides a framework which allows module writers to write test suites than can query a running mod_perl enabled server. It is used by mod_perl, httpd and several third party applications, and includes support for Apache modules written in C, mod_perl, PHP and Parrot. no new Apache-Test releases since the last report -- Development -- mod_perl continues to be an active and healthy development community - bugs are found, bugs are fixed, development moves forward as usual. -- Users -- The mod_perl users list is, as always, thriving. nothing noteworthy has happened since the last report. -- PMC -- on the PMC front we added a new committer this past quarter, Joe Orton, who is no stranger to the mod_perl or httpd projects and who fits in nicely with our little corner of the ASF. also of note was that Philip Gollucci, a mod_perl and apreq committer, was nominated (and accepted) into the membership of the ASF. in turn, Philip was also added to the perl PMC. Perrin Harkins was able to provide a brief overview of the mod_perl 2.0 release for inclusion in the January 12, 2006 ASF press release. well done, everyone. finally, on a sad note, committer Slava Bizyayev passed away in January. Slava had commit access only to the documentation portion of the mod_perl project, but we deeply regret his passing. ----------------------------------------- Attachment H: Status report for the Apache Xalan Project Xalan-C ======= Nothing to report. Just bug fixes. Xalan-J ======= There has been less activity from the Xalan-J developers and open defects are starting to rise. A periodic tele-conference of Xalan-J committers to discuss JIRA issues was opened to contributors on Feb 7, 2005, but no contributors asked to join the tele-conference. It is likely that a point fix release, 2.7.1 will occur in the near future, but that point-release is not in plan. ----------------------------------------- Attachment I: Status report for the Apache Xerces Project Xerces-J -- The Xerces-J 2.8.0 release is planned for this month (February, 2006). Development items include features for disabling ID/IDREF, unparsed entity and identity constraint checking, a property for starting schema assessment from a specific type definition and enhancements to XML schema annotation support. We've had a few new volunteers come forward to help out with the effort who seem interested in becoming regular contributors. An up to date version of the release plan is available here [1]. [1] http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/xerces/java/trunk/Xerces2.8.0-REL_PLAN.html Xerces-P -- We are preparing for a 2.7 release at the end of February. This release mirrors the Xerces-C 2.7 release from last year. We are also preparing for a 3.0 co-release with Xerces-C, which will informally merge the two projects into the same codebase. A more formal merge of Xerces-C with all scripting language bindings (right now only Xerces-Perl, but could be extended to Xerces-Python, Xerces-Ruby easily thanks to SWIG) will take place later in 2006. Xerces-C -- Planned work for the 3.0 release is still ongoing. Many bug fixes have gone in in the last 3 months. We hope to release a minor bug fix version for 2.7 and a 3.0 in the next quarter. A couple of the guys who started contributing last quarter continue to do so and we are getting more now people contributing bug reports as well as patches in some cases. ----------------------------------------- Attachment J: Status report for the Apache XML Project 1. General The XML PMC is undergoing maintenance. It seems that a good deal of current PMC members is MIA, since they never answered a couple of roll calls. It has been suggested to vote inactive members out, as per the #5.9 of the PMC charter, but a suggestion from the board about the proper course of action is most welcome. We have 20 members listed in our PMC, yet, these 10 guys failed to respond when asked if/ how they were about: Scott Boag (*) Kip Hampton Vincent Hardy (*) Brian Minchau (*) Steven Noels (*) Santiago Pericas-Geertsen Joerg Pietschmann Jason Stewart Erwin van der Koogh PeiYong Zhang The PMC continues to have oversight on the various projects, even though we have just one guy looking after, respectively, XML Security (Berin) and Axkit (Matt). Given the general lack of activity on the projects, this isn't a major issue as of now, but it's expected that a heavy reshuffle of the PMC takes place in the next quarter. Andy Clark and Ted Leung have left the PMC. 2. Subproject reports a. XML Commons Almost no activity, except for the addition of a branch to XML Commons. External which now contains the W3C-licensed sources Apache Batik needs. The branch was created due to possible problems with the JAXP 1.3 TCK. b. Xindice Almost no activity either. Vadim keeps maintaining the current codebase, but with few, in any, interest from the community. c. XML Security Work has continued on integrating the JSR-105 code, and this is now complete. In addition there have been the standard run of bug fixes on both the C++ and Java code bases. d. AxKit No activity to report. ----------------------------------------- Attachment K: Status report for the Apache XML Graphics Project General Comments None. Batik Steady activity rate with bugfixes and improvements. No releases. The move of W3C licensed classes to XML Commons Externals has started. The classes are now available in a branch at XML Commons Externals. Batik only has to review the setup and remove its own copies now. People from Debian documentation and Wikipedia have a big interest in compiling Batik to platform-specific binaries using Gnu/GCJ. A patch that will allow for that is available but has not been applied yet. FOP FOP is back in business! Two releases: 0.90 alpha 1 (2005-11-23) and 0.91 beta (2005-12-24). Since the first release a lot of bugs have been fixed and some new features added. The quality is quickly approaching the level of the old 0.20.5 release. We've started the IP clearance process for an AFP renderer (output format implementation) that was developed at SourceForge. ----------------------------------------- Attachment L: Status report for the Public Relations Committee There was significant press this month around the Kabuki incubation and open source Ajax, in general. We were cited extensively in a report on the launch of a new Open Source Geospatial Foundation that is being modelled after the ASF. We also sent a follow up correction to that particular reporter to modify some misperceptions about how the ASF works. We were featured extensively in the Enterprise Open Source Journal (the link is here: http://www.eosj.com/issues/eosj_06_0102.pdf) - with one article on "What is the Apache Software Foundation" and the other in a Gartner commentary on open source mergers & acquisitions. We are in the process of responding to the Gartner analyst to correct some errors in his report. Other Activities: Cliff Schmidt and Susan are speaking at OSBC this week. We are engaging Halo Worldwide, Sally's PR firm, as our public relations agency. We are in the process of determining how best to engage with and manage the agency. We are in the process of retooling our sponsorship program - we are reviewing logo guidelines, sponsorship tier structure, and creating a list of sponsors who will be grandfathered into the program. Outstanding Issues: PRC@ has ~60 subscribed to the list, but only 5-6 people are regular contributors. We are debating creating a prc-private@ which would be for PRC PMC members only, where we could discuss issues of a sensitive and confidential nature (for example, issues relating to sponsors). Overall ASF Strategy: we continue to have discussions around what our "brand" is and what leadership role the PRC should play in leading this discussion. Overall infrastructure: how best should the PRC interact and work with PMCs for PMC-specific marketing activities? Timeliness and responsiveness: Many general public inquiries have been falling through the cracks and we haven't done a good job of responding in a timely manner. We are debating whether or not to install a bug tracking system so as to prevent these inquiries from falling through the cracks. ----------------------------------------- Attachment M: Status report for the Apache / Java Community Process ----------------------------------------- Attachment N: Status report for the Security Team There continues to be a steady stream of reports of various kinds arriving at security@apache.org. These continue to be dealt with promptly by the security team, most notably Mark Cox. The good news is that the majority of projects new appear to have security@ addresses so its possible to have the reports dealt with by the right people. The bad news is that we continue to not properly track issues, resulting in them getting dropped on the floor too often. ------------------------------------------------------ End of minutes for the February 15, 2006 board meeting.