Category: Community

Congratulations to the new Apache Board

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”

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.

mybatis.org forks from Apache iBATIS

The bulk of the active development community for the Apache iBATIS project has decided to fork the code, and move their development efforts to the new project they’ve founded called mybatis. While this may be old news to iBATIS/mybatis users, I thought it deserved a wider mention, both about the fork and some of the thoughts behind it.

What is mybatis?

mybatis.org is a new, independent project run by Clinton Begin and most of the PMC members and active committers of the Apache iBATIS project. It’s a fork of all the iBATIS code under a new name. They’ve recently released mybatis 3.0.1 GA, which will be the primary focus of development for the new mybatis team. They currently ship mybatis releases using the Apache License.

Since it’s a fork of the existing iBATIS code, it provides the same advanced SQL data mapping functionality that existing users expect. “MyBatis couples objects with stored procedures or SQL statements using a XML descriptor. Simplicity is the biggest advantage of the MyBatis data mapper over object relational mapping tools.”

Who is mybatis?

Clinton Begin, the original creator of iBATIS in 2001, is leading the project. Along with him are the bulk of the active developers of both mybatis (for Java) and mybatis.net. They are using Google Code to host the projects, along with source code, mailing lists and bug trackers. The project is independent, and is not directly associated with the ASF.

What will happen to Apache iBATIS?

The ASF is a public charity with the mission of provide software for the public good. Thus, we will continue to provide the complete source code under the Apache license in the future. In terms of the project as a whole, it’s expected that due to lack of community still participating at the ASF, it will be moved to the Apache Attic during the upcoming mid-June board meeting. That will mean the PMC and officer positions associated with Apache iBATIS will be dissolved, and some time thereafter, the website, mailing lists, and code for the project will be moved to the Attic for future read only reference.

Projects are moved to the Attic when there isn’t a sufficiently active and healthy community (primarily at the PMC level) to provide oversight to the project and it’s releases. The decision to move projects to the Attic is not a technical one – it’s purely a community issue. A project’s code and past history are always freely available to users, although in a read-only state. If, in the future, a sufficiently diverse community wishes to re-activate the project and follow the Apache Way, we welcome that.

What’s the difference? Why did mybatis want to fork?

Obviously, you’ll need to ask the mybatis team for the answer to this question. From emails I’ve exchanged with Clinton, and seen from other members of the mybatis team, my impression is that the difference wasn’t specifically technical, more organizational. They simply have a different vision for how to develop open source software projects than the ASF does.

ASF projects are expected to follow a number of procedures roughly known as “The Apache Way”. We believe that software projects with a diverse community; that use a consensus process to make decisions; and that do all their work in the open results in the best overall quality and longest lasting projects. While the ASF expects it’s projects to follow the Apache Way, we certainly understand that not everyone believes that our way of software development is the right one for everyone or for all projects.

While there were some unfortunate miscommunications (not necessarily anyone in particular’s fault) in the process of the fork, I hope there is no ill-will between the ASF and the mybatis team. While it’s sad that the ASF is losing a project (and the community with it), we wish the mybatis project luck in their work.

Is it OK for them to fork the project?

Of course! The Apache License is written to provide the maximum freedom to the users of our software. This means you are free to re-use any of the code we produce in almost any way you wish, including building atop it to create a proprietary product, or by forking the code and re-architecting the whole thing. While we always appreciate developers who choose to contribute fixes and new code back to our projects, we’re perfectly happy for people to take our code and do their own thing with it, either privately, or shared with the world.

So, good luck to mybatis, and mark this as (I think) the first time the ASF has had a coherent community choose to fork themselves and move elsewhere in a productive manner!

Congratulations to six new Apache projects!

In last week’s monthly meeting of the Board of Directors of the ASF, we approved the creation of six new Top Level Projects (TLPs) at the ASF. This is the most new TLPs ever created at once, followed only by the meeting of November, 2008 where 5 new TLPs were created (CouchDB, Buildr, the Attic, Qpid, and Abdera).

In this particular case, much of the growth comes from within existing projects, wherein subprojects communities within Hadoop and Lucene have matured sufficiently to deserve to manage their own fates, and to create their own Project Mangement Committees (PMCs) to take charge. To put this in another perspective, this is also reflective of the ASF’s growth; before this meeting we had over 70 TLPs and over 30 Incubator podlings, so an addition of 6 new TLPs is less than 10% growth for the month.

We should congratulate the Apache Traffic Server community first, since they went through the Incubation process and successfully graduated from an Incubator Podling into their own TLP. Soon to be served (once the website migration is complete) from http://trafficserver.apache.org/, Apache Traffic Server is fast, scalable and extensible HTTP/1.1 compliant caching proxy server. Congratulations to the whole team in showing a strong and diverse community around this new product.

Next up come three subprojects within the well-known Apache Lucene project which have grown organically from modules within Lucene to be diverse and active projects within their own right. You may recognize some of these product names from the Lucene world.

  • Apache Mahout, which is building a system for creating scalable and effective machine learning libraries which can perform recommendation mining, clustering, classification, and grouping into itemsets.
  • Apache Tika is a toolkit for detecting and extracting metadata and structured text content from various documents using existing parser libraries.
  • Apache Nutch, integratable with both Lucene and Hadoop, adds web-specific crawling, fetching, and organization features.

The Apache Hadoop project – another wildly distributed computing technology – has also grown two of it’s subprojects to the point where they deserve their own fame.

  • Apache Avro is a fast data serialization system that includes rich and dynamic schemas in all it’s processing.
  • Apache HBase is the Hadoop database – designed to provide random, realtime read/write access to Big Data – billions of records – using commodity hardware.

Why did these subprojects spin out to become their own TLPs? The driving factor is not the technology, but rather the community and oversight aspects of how the ASF organizes it’s mostly self-running projects.

From the oversight perspective, the ASF Board relies on every project’s PMC to manage their project’s operations within the broad guidelines of the Apache Way, and to report their project’s progress and issues to the board. This means that there must be enough PMC members who can actively monitor and participate in their project’s activities, and can especially show due diligence and responsibility in voting on any official product releases the project makes. With the rapid growth in both community and technology areas in the Hadoop and Lucene projects, it’s a difficult job for the PMCs to truly understand and help manage all the subprojects they’ve created or added over the past two years.

While the scope of oversight may have hinted that some subprojects should be promoted to TLP status, the gating factor is community. Does a subproject have a strong and diverse enough community to provide their own, independent PMC that can manage their own affairs? Becoming a TLP is both a benefit and a responsibility: the community through it’s new, more focused PMC can better run itself; however the new PMC is also expected to provide accurate reports and responsible oversight of their community and product releases.

Congratulations to all six new projects! Please note that as the websites are updated, each project will be moving it’s home page to http://projectname.apache.org in the near future.

Winter holiday ASF news roundup

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.

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.

Congratulations to the new Board!

The ASF just concluded it’s annual member’s meeting, where we elected a new board of directors. Before I list them here, I want to say what gets said at every member’s meeting when we elect a new board:

THANK YOU! To the hard work and dedication from all the past board members, and our executive officers.

This is in no way to overlook the work that all our committers have willingly donated to the ASF’s mission of producing software for the public good.  But it is a recognition of the steps above and beyond that serving as a director or officer of the ASF requires.

The new board of directors for the ASF are:

  • Shane Curcuru
  • Doug Cutting
  • Justin Erenkrantz
  • Roy T. Fielding
  • Jim Jagielski
  • Geir Magnusson Jr
  • Brian McCallister
  • Brett Porter
  • Greg Stein

I’ve also compiled a updated graphical history of ASF directors.

Graphical overview of Sun’s JSPA violations

Stephen Colebourne has done an amazing job in explaining Sun’s violations of the JSPA and why it’s important to the ASF and open software. This is a must read for anyone interested in the issue of shipping open or free Java software.

There’s a lot of commentary – both pro and con – over the ASF’s open letter to Sun about the JSPA and Sun’s inappropriate field of use restrictions on the JCK that would be provided for Apache Harmony. It seems that much of the commentary is missing the true issues, either from not understanding the true the details, or because people or organizations have their own agendas to promote.

By adding this clause, it meant that the tested code would need to contain an additional clause over and above the standard Apache license. A clause that would be invalid for any open source software as defined by the OSI. To be clear, this FOU clause would be an issue for any open source group trying to implement the Java SE specification. – S. Colebourne

Here are some resources that are worth reading about the issue:

Stephen’s excellent graphical overview
This shows clear pictures of how Sun inserts a field of use restriction clause to block Apache Harmony.
Stephen’s overview of IP throughout the JCP process
This shows how the JCP is supposed to safeguard and provide open licensing of IP within any specification, ensuring that independent vendors can implement the specifications.
The ASF’s Open Letter to Sun
This is the official position of the ASF, and while it’s an important document, it’s not as easy to read as other sources. There is a FAQ from the ASF available which offers some insight.
Geir’s commentary on the current state of the issue
The ASF’s own Geir Magnusson Jr., VP of JCP, and Dalibor Topic duel over the topic, alternately attempting to sidestep the issue or lock horns straight on.
The actual JCP vote on JSP-316: Java EE 6
While the ASF is the only organization that actually voted No, you really need to read the comments from other voters, as well as evaluate the Abstain votes.
The JCP’s own procedure documentation, including a glossary
The JCP itself has governance rules. If you really want to understand the background about how the JCP works, there’s a lot more history; in this case it’s really the foundation of how JCP rules that is at issue with what Sun has been doing.

0x04 days until ApacheCon: Read this! All the feeds about Apache & ApacheCon

There are a wide variety of content sources for the ASF and ApacheCon, including a number of official ones (i.e. from moderated sources or from specific PMCs or ASF officers) as well as a stunning array of unofficial ones (from members, committers, and others associated with the ASF).

Note that the many projects, Incubator Podlings, and Labs hosted at the ASF have their own feeds and lists as well; this list only includes ASF-wide resources or ApacheCon-specific resources that have an obvious feed.

Official Feeds related to ApacheCon

Official Feeds related to the ASF

Tags related to the ASF

#apachecon, #meetup, #barcamp
hashtags for Twitter, etc.
ApacheCon, ApacheConEU09
Blog and photo tags (Also see our flickr groups)(per-show tags generally follow the format of [US|EU][08|09])
apache
A tag most often associated with technical issues about the HTTP Server project, although sometimes about the ASF overall
asf
An overall tag sometimes associated with the ASF and sometimes… not.

Typography Test

This is a sample post for testing typography.  Yes, I’m vain; I take forever to pick a theme.

Primary Heading

  1. Ordered lists
  2. I tend to over-use them; I should really work on editing structure more
  3. Three is a good number

And now for something different

O Fortuna, velut Luna statu variabilis, semper crescis aut decrescis; vita detestabilis nunc obdurat et tunc curat ludo mentis aciem; egestatem, potestatem, dissolvit ut glaciem.

Sors immanis et inanis, rota tu volubilis, status malus, vana salus semper dissolubilis; obumbrata et velata mihi quoque niteris; nunc per ludum dorsum nudum fero tui sceleris.

Sors salutis et virtutis mihi nunc contraria; est affectus et defectus semper in angaria. Hac in hora sine mora cordae pulsum tangite! Quod per sortem sternit fortem, mecum omnes plangite!

A personal preference

Shane likes definition lists
A simple and structural way to introduce a topic, and then describe it.  Somehow, his brain thinks that way.
Ut eu lacus.
Aliquam erat volutpat. Integer eget diam et quam pulvinar bibendum.

Heading 4 Is Only barely smaller than 3

Fusce eu lacus et risus interdum vestibulum. Proin a nisi. Phasellus ac nisi. In urna. Integer eu ligula at massa porta dignissim. Etiam vitae libero pharetra felis semper luctus. Nam semper. Maecenas non risus sed elit imperdiet laoreet. Ut eros elit, commodo interdum, aliquam in, ullamcorper sed, urna.

Get serious, who really uses H5?


# Every planet needs a [Planet] section
# [http://www.blog.com/rss]
# face = foo.png
# faceheight = 32

At level 6 you might as well use >small<

Break test:
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Add in some e.e.cummings, and that’d break the test!