Monthly Archives: July 2010

July Apache news roundup: Greg! Adobe+Day! FOP! FOP?

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A brief listing of some of the news around the ASF this past month.

Oh, and the ASF elected a new board of directors as well – there are some different (and one new) faces, but overall, we expect steady sailing into better waters.

Want to get your own news about Apache projects? Read or feed from the announce list, official Foundation and project blogs, or get the Planet Apache community perspective.

Apache is at at OSCON!

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For those of you lucky enough to be attending OSCON this week in Portland, there will be a number of well-know Apache folk there, as well as some talks about Apache projects. Plus, the ASF has an official exhibitor’s booth, #812 at the expo.

Sadly, I won’t be attending, but I did pick out a handful of cool Apache-related OSCON sessions you should check out. Be sure to stop by the ASF booth and say hi to Sally, Justin, and all the Apache volunteers who will be there to answer your open source questions, Apache Way style.

While OSCON is about everything open source, Apache both as a Foundation and a community of projects is about a specific kind of open source. The power of “Community Over Code” which epitomizes much of The Apache Way that Apache projects follow is brought to light by a great blog posting by Noah Slater of his CouchDB Retrospective. Thanks Noah for a great essay on your journey to a true community led project!

Have fun at OSCON – wish I were there!

Congratulations to the new Apache Board

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The Apache Software Foundation held it’s Annual Member’s Meeting this week and cast votes to elect a new board of directors as we do each year. We also elected a number of new potential members, who may be receiving their private invitations shortly.

The new 2010-2011 Board of Directors comprises:

  • Shane Curcuru
  • Doug Cutting
  • Bertrand Delacretaz
  • Roy T. Fielding
  • Jim Jagielski
  • Sam Ruby
  • Noirin Shirley
  • Greg Stein
  • Henri Yandell

We welcome Noirin Shirley, who will be a new face on the board this year. We also welcome back Henri, Sam, and Bertrand who have served on the board in the past; the remaining directors are incumbents.

A big round of thanks went out during our meeting (on irc) for all of the non-returning directors Brett, Geir, Brian, and especially for Justin Erenkrantz who has also been serving as the Foundation’s President as well as a director.

See also the official ASF Foundation blog posting with the announcement.

A graphical history of the directors of the ASF is also available.

Likely Fraud Alert: “apache-project dot org”

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Several people have contacted the ASF recently asking about an “Apache Indonesia Project”, something to do with “Digitization of Indonesian Population”, and/or something to do with an Apache 4.3 database server. The reports reference the domain name “apache-project dot org” (which I won’t link directly to here).

PLEASE NOTE: all of these projects or organizations have nothing to do with either the Apache Software Foundation, nor anything to do with any Apache projects. Their use of the “Apache” name is certainly not approved, and it is likely a violation of the ASF’s trademarks. Any references to an “Apache 4.3 – anything” are either bogus or a direct violation of our trademarks, since the ASF ships no such product.

Unfortunately, we’ve had a couple of recent reports of people sending them cash to get some sort of training DVD for an outsourcing project, and then wondering why they never hear back from the organization. Sadly, it seems that some scammer has decided to try to make some fast cash using the Apache name.

Remember: software from the ASF is always free to use following the conditions in our license, and the ASF will never ask for money for the software products that any of our projects create, nor to participate in any of our mailing lists. The ASF certainly appreciates anyone who voluntarily chooses to Sponsor the ASF, but material donations are never expected nor solicited in exchange for any Apache software.

If you’re ever in doubt about the source of information, remember: if it’s not hosted at apache.org, it’s probably not officially from the ASF. Much like here at Community Over Code: posts here are Shane’s own thoughts, and do not reflect the official position of the ASF. In this case, however, I’m confident that many other ASF members are equally upset about this seeming mis-use of our good name.

apache.numprojects -= 1; apache.karaf.intro = “Welcome!”

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For only the fourth time in our history at last month’s June board meeting we passed resolutions that effectively reduced the total number of Apache projects by one.

  • As was widely expected, the board terminated the Apache iBATIS project, and sent it to the Apache Attic. This recognizes that we don’t expect there to be an active Apache iBATIS community, and that we don’t expect there to be any new development in that project for a while. The Apache Attic will continue to provide all the project’s resources on a read-only basis for any existing users. (Note: current users may also be interested in the external fork over at mybatis.org)
  • The board also terminated the little-known Apache Quetzalcoatl project and moved it to the Attic. “Quetz” had been charged with developing the mod_python module, but it never really took off as an organized Apache project. Current users may be interested in finding the sources over at modpython.org
  • In happier news, the board voted to promote an Apache Felix subproject named Karaf to top-level status. Apache Karaf is a small OSGi based runtime which provides a lightweight container onto which various components and applications can be deployed. The Felix PMC had seen that there was sufficient community around just the Karaf subproject that it deserved to have it’s own project.

So that’s two projects down, but one project up for the month of June.

iBATIS and Quetz both join previously retired projects in the Attic, HiveMind, Shale, AxKit, Xang, Beehive, and Jakarta Taglibs. Each are projects that had lost an effective Apache community able to actively develop them.

In the past, the ASF has also terminated a handful of other projects before the Attic was opened in 2008; those include Apache Commons (the first version) and Apache Avalon, both terminated for community issues. The ASF also once had an Apache PHP project that was terminated; in that case it was a happy and mutual separation of the PHP Group from the ASF.

Resolutions for creating and terminating Apache projects are passed by the board, typically at monthly meetings, and our public records of formal board actions are always available.

Stay tuned for news of the upcoming Annual Member’s Meeting of the ASF being held in mid-July, where we’ll also be electing a new board of directors.