Category: Community

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!