It’s continued to be a busy winter at the ASF, with a number of new projects being announced – as well as this year’s ApacheCon!
- Submit your ideas now for the CFP of ApacheCon NA 2011 – coming to Vancouver this 7-11 November. CFP submissions are open through April.
- Welcome Apache Extras! Apache Extras is the the place for all your Apache-related software that’s not an Apache project. That means that projects that might not use the Apache license or might not meet the community criteria for formal Apache projects, but are still related to Apache technology. Apache Extras gives you all the infrastructure support of Google Code, and shows your project’s interest in Apache technologies.
- Welcome to our new Executive Assistant! The ASF has hired an EA to assist with a broad array of administrative tasks, who is already helping out with our conferences and other corporate operations.
- We’ve got new top level projects! Over the past few months, the Incubator has graduated the following projects:
- Apache Thrift is a scalable cross-language framework for code generation between a wide variety of popular programming languages.
- Apache ZooKeeper, an Apache Hadoop spinoff, provides a centralized service for providing distributed synchronization of configuration information and other services.
- Apache OODT (press release) is middleware for managing data used in critical scientific applications – and features original code and contributors from NASA and the JPL. Yes, real rocket scientists work on OODT!
- Apache ESME stands for Enterprise Social Messaging Environment, and allos for secure and scalable microsharing and micromessaging applications.
- Apache Aries implements the EEG’s enterprise OSGi specification for multi-bundle applications.
- Apache River implements JINI services and allows construction of secure and distributed systems.
- Apache Chemistry (press release) is an implementation of the OASIS CMIS standard, allowing access to a wide variety of different vendor’s CMIS repositories.
There were several other interesting happenings in Apache land recently as well.
- Apache UIMA and Hadoop technologies helped IBM’s Watson supercomputer defeat humanity in the TV game show Jeopardy! As one of the human contestants wrote: “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.”
- The Apache Subversion project issued an open letter to a corporation who is an active contributor and user of Subversion. While this is an unfortunate situation of a third party effectively usurping some of the good will generated by the Subversion project itself, the issue is being addressed, and it looks like we’ll have a productive resolution. This underscores the importance of appropriate governance and trademark protection for open source projects.
- Separately, those interested in using Apache projects may be interested in a number of much more detailed trademark policies that the ASF is working on, in an effort to make it simpler for third parties to associate with our projects, while ensuring that our project communities get full and proper credit for their work.
- Apache Third Party Domain Name Branding Policy – where the Rationale is an important explanation of why our trademark policies are written as they are.
- Apache Third Party Event Branding Policy
- Note that we are working on a Services Branding policy which is expected to be similar to the Domain Name policy as well, for those who wish to host services using our marks and software.
