There have been a number of exciting updates at and around the ASF over the winter holidays – which I enjoyed quite well with a long spell offline. No more; here are some of the key Apache news from the past month.

• Welcome Facebook as a Gold sponsor of the ASF! We all thank the growing list of formal ASF sponsors for their financial support – which goes to great use supporting our ever growing services for projects and committers
• Welcome the new Community Development PMC to the ASF. Luciano has some good discussion about this new project, and welcome to Ross as the new VP of the project.
• Welcome also to the three new more traditional code PMCs created at the December board meeting, Apache Pivot (building rich apps with Java & XML), Apache OpenWebBeans (implements JSR-299), and Apache Axis (combining Axis1 and Axis2 with common components).
• Users of Apache SpamAssassin should be sure to read about this critical advisory.
• Apache httpd admins probably already know this, but discussions are underway to declare 1.3.x and 2.0.x branches as deprecated soon.
• For those who missed it, much of ApacheCon US 2009 is not available as free archived video streams.

Reminder: as the official Foundation blog states, the only content officially produced by the ASF as an organization happens at apache.org domains. This blog is written by Shane, is solely my work, and represents neither the official policy nor views of either the ASF or my employer.