ApacheCon Denver is NEXT WEEK!

Wow, that was fast! I’ll be seeing a number of you next week in Denver – both for ApacheCon and the immediately following CloudStack Collaboration conference. I’ve finally filled in my tentative schedule, and this will be a huge conference for fans of many, many different Apache project fans.

Did you know ApacheCon has Lucene & Friends talks every day? Of course there are five separate categories of Hadoop talks with multiple tracks. And having many more rooms than past ApacheCons – 9 simultaneous tracks – projects like Tomcat (and the Friday Tomcat Summit!), Cordova, CXF, OpenOffice, and Traffic Server each have their own dedicated tracks. And, the whole host of different cloud projects at Apache have their own 2+ days – just at ApacheCon. Of course Apache CloudStack has it’s own whole 2 day conference immediately after ApacheCon wraps up!

In a first, I’ll be speaking three times this week in my role as Vice President, Brand Management: one talk about what Apache projects need to do to help protect their brands, and another talk (reprised at CloudStack) about how your for-profit company can respect Apache brands. While I hope to have time for Q&A in these sessions, I’d also love to hear from everyone about their questions about Apache brands anytime during the conference.

If you’re a committer or a PMC member, you can do your homework and read up on PMC Branding Responsibilities beforehand.

For long-time ApacheCon attendees (I’m over a dozen, myself), there will be a few changes for the better. The transition to our new conference management company, the Linux Foundation, has gone great so far, and they’ve helped us plan out the largest and most ambitious ApacheCon to date. Hope to see you there!

Apache Governance – Projects First

When push comes to shove and full consensus on governance matters at the ASF or at Apache projects isn’t easily found, it’s important to consider what our underlying objectives are. The mission of the ASF is to produce software for the public good. That’s a good start, but like many concise mission statements, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

There are several aspects of how we expect Apache projects to work that we believe are critical to our mission’s success and longevity. These include things like The Apache Way of: volunteer and collaborative led community built software projects; using the permissive Apache license; and having a consistent and stable brand, infrastructure services, and home for all Apache projects.

Continue reading Apache Governance – Projects First

Congratulations Apache Chukwa – the 140th Apache TLP!

Last month, the Apache Chukwa podling passed the Incubator’s graduation vote. At the October Apache board meeting, the directors voted unanimously to create the Apache Chukwa top level project, with responsibility for creating an open source data collection system for monitoring large distributed systems.

While this may seem to be yet another project in the fast-growing constellation of Apache Hadoop-related technologies hosted at the ASF, the important milestone is that this is now the 140th active project at Apache! That is, there are currently one hundred and forty independent project communities, all producing software for the public good, all currently hosted at the ASF. That includes everything from the ubiquitous HTTP Server project, through the widely used Lucene search engine, to the aptly named Rave project, and the admittedly niche-functionality MINA project.

Note that this does not count the 36 separate podlings that are currently in the Apache Incubator – each one is an independent community hoping to grow it’s community (and make some software releases) so that they too can graduate to become an official Apache project.

More importantly, this is not the 140th project that’s ever been at Apache. At Apache, we believe in Community over Code; in that having an active and collaborative community is the most important factor in Apache project governance. However we recognize the immense public good that Apache projects do by providing software, especially source code, under our permissive license.

So what to do when we have an older project that may have lost it’s active community? Well, we put it in the Apache Attic, of course! There are currently 14 projects in the Apache Attic, along with a number of subprojects and other bits of software that are still hopefully useful, but that do not currently have an active community at Apache maintaining them. In that way, we provide the code for anyone who needs it, but warn users not to expect the normal support and releases of a full-fledged Apache project.

Putting that all together, we have a full 190 project communities that have chosen the Apache Software Foundation as their home over the past 14 years. A pretty good footprint for an all-volunteer run organization that started with a handful of geeks emailing code patches around to each other!

There are many places to choose to host your project today. Some people prefer other organizations for their project’s hosting – or simply forgo hosting a “project” and merely look for a place to dump their code. That’s fine, and we respect everyone else’s choices. Some people even go so far as to say that Apache doesn’t get it, or isn’t cool, or other uncomplimentary things. That’s fine too: we can agree to disagree.

If you really don’t see the value in being an Apache project – I mean, not just see the value for yourself (which is completely fine, I don’t care); but if you truly can’t see the value that someone might find in wanting to be an Apache project, then… well, sorry, then I can’t help you at all. You can stop reading now.

Even if you don’t see the value for your project right now in coming to the ASF, I hope that you can see the larger values: longevity, brand protection, stability, strong communities, and collaboration amongst many different groups within our communities. While some of these values may not be exciting for the rockstars out there, they certainly are exciting for the millions of software users out there – both small scale and corporate scale users appreciate using software that seems to have a better chance to be around, and be supported for the longer haul.

And even if you don’t see the value here at Apache, that’s OK. We’ve had 190 other communities of people who do see the value over the past 14 years, and our aim is to be here for another 50+ years to come. We’re happy with what we’re doing – and with the immense public good our many, many freely usable software products we’ve provided to the world.

Congratulations to the 2013 Apache Board of Directors

The ASF recently held it’s Annual Member’s Meeting where all Members of the Foundation cast ballots in the annual election for the Board. I was lucky enough to be elected, so I will be returning to the board, along with new first time Director Chris Mattmann. Everyone also thanked our two outgoing Directors, Rich Bowen and Ross Gardler.

The new board comprises:

  • Shane Curcuru
  • Doug Cutting (chairman)
  • Bertrand Delacretaz
  • Roy T. Fielding
  • Jim Jagielski
  • Chris Mattmann
  • Brett Porter
  • Sam Ruby
  • Greg Stein

I also keep a graphical history of the Apache board.

Shane’s Apache Director Position Statement 2013

The ASF is holding it’s Annual Member’s Meeting this coming week, where the Membership elects a new board of directors along with other matters, like voting in new Member candidates. While I was nominated last year, I was not elected. I would have been sad about not getting a seat, except for the fact that such other fabulously good people got elected instead (including two new directors who got to serve their first terms, Rich and Ross, yay!).

Director candidates at the ASF write position statements about what their objectives for being a director are in preparation for the voting process. Since I write what I believe in, I also am posting my statement here, publicly. One of the biggest issues for the smooth functioning of the ASF as a home for healthy projects is doing a better job of explaining how we work – I hope this helps people understand us Apache types just a little bit better. You can also see what I wrote last year.

If you’re wondering how governance at Apache really works, I’ve written an Apache governance overview too.

Shane Curcuru (curcuru) Director Position Statement

v2.0 statement

As the ASF scales in people, projects, and impact on the world, we
need directors that can ensure our organization stays true to it’s
ideals; that can delegate appropriately and efficiently to officers
and PMCs; and especially that can communicate calmly, clearly,
and consistently in all of their communications.

As we surpass one million $ in assets, with thousands of committers, nearly a gross of projects, and an huge impact both on the software world with our technology, and on the larger world of computer users with our products, I believe it’s important to do an even better job of explaining what the ASF is about and how the Apache Way works.

While we don’t need more rules, we do need to do a much better job of explaining what our few hard requirements are, as well as showcasing the wealth of best practices that our projects have created. This is important both to let the world know who we are, and also to ensure that the many different communities of contributors can more easily understand how to work with our projects.

With the fast growing scale of our organization, it is critical that directors and corporate officers can communicate clearly, calmly, and professionally in all of their Apache related activities – whether or not they’re explicitly showing which hat they’re wearing at the moment. As our impact grows, so does the impact of our words, both inside our communities, attracting (or not) new members to our communities, and also on the larger world of corporations, universities, and other computer using peoples. Even if we as long-time denizens of members@ understand which hat a director or officer is wearing when they speak, most other human beings and most other contributors don’t necessarily see the distinction.

It has been a long time since we held in-person member’s meetings
where everyone knew each others personal style. As we grow,
we need to be sure that we’re making it easy for new members and
contributors to feel welcomed and understand how Apache works. We also need to ensure that we both can keep the sense of family and enjoyable, collaborative community that the membership and our projects have, and that we manage the affairs of the ASF and of our projects in a consistent, documented, and professional manner.

About Shane

I’ve been a committer since November 1999, a Member since 2002,
and VP, Brand Management since 2009.

I am employed by IBM in the HR division as an Applications Architect. My employment and income have been unrelated to my work at the ASF for many years, and I will always clearly separate volunteer work from employer-funded work.

My involvement in the ASF is driven by a belief in, and a love of,
the ASF, and is not influenced by politics or finances. I live in
Massachusetts with my wife, young daughter, and 2 cats. I view
directorships and officer positions at the ASF as serious commitments.

I will attend every board meeting if elected.

Thanks to the Apache CloudStack community!

Apache CloudStack graduated to become a top level project at the ASF last month, and a number of community members have been blogging about their experience. CloudStack started with a company called Cloud.com, was purchased by Citrix, and then was submitted to the Apache Incubator last year to now become a full Apache project.

Along with the great CloudStack software that Apache can now provide that allows you to manage your own public or private IaaS clouds, the Apache community has gained a great new community of committers, users, and PMC members.

In reading the several blog posts by key CloudStack contributors, I reminded myself that kudos were in order as well.

Having watched Citrix bring their code and developers to the Apache Incubator, and having watched (and commented on and answered many questions from!) the podling as it grew it’s community and graduated, I’ve been struck by how well the core Citrix contributors and their many other participants really took to the Apache Way.

Both Citrix as an organization (which employs some of the CloudStack committers), and especially the many contributors to the CloudStack project took the incubation process seriously, and have really gone above and beyond to ensure their podling proposal and march to graduation have been about Apache CloudStack, as well as being about an inclusive and meritocratic project.

The desire to get things “right” at Apache was clear in everything the CloudStack community did, and the end result looks to be an incredibly strong project that’s quickly gathering developers from a wide variety of vendors and users. Part of this growth is about the great technology; but a lot is due to the helpful and welcoming face that the CloudStack committers put on their project.

We’ve had a lot of great projects, and many great communities come to the Apache Incubator; there are a lot of people to thank across the tremendous spectrum of no-charge software that the ASF provides for the public good. But I just wanted to mention the extra effort the CloudStack community put into fully embracing the Apache Way. Good job, and thanks!

Apache Corporate Policies

The old saying goes that one of the last things done in many open source projects is the documentation. Taking this to the organizational level at the ASF – the corporate level – that’s both all too true, and not at all true.

Questions regularly come up across various ASF lists about all sorts of corporate operations, and there are a fair number of times when it takes a while to get the right answer to the questioner. Luckily, we have a lot of very experienced Members and Officers who are there to ensure the right thing does happen – but I believe that the answers come be a lot quicker if we had better documentation for these corporate operations. Namely, all the stuff that’s not dealing with code.

This is not to say we haven’t documented how the ASF as a corporation works: a lot of effort has gone into our standard operating procedures, and we’ve both covered the basic legalistic bases, as well as put serious thought into minimizing the absolute rules at Apache while providing lots of best practices. These procedures – and the discussions of pros and cons and whys explaining how they came to be that way – are all available… on the mailing lists, somewhere. 😉

The foundation of our corporate policies is The Apache Way. Understanding that, and understanding that the fundamental mission of the ASF is to produce software code for the public good, leads you to many of the policies we practice, both at the ASF and in Apache projects. To start with, here’s a brief laundry list of how to learn about Apache Corporate Policies.

  • Apache Corporate Governance and org chart describe organizationally how the ASF as a corporation is run. This also makes clear the distinction between organizational governance – the board, membership, and officers as a whole; and technical governance – the fact that PMCs independently manage their projects.
  • The Foundation page provides the overall corporate mission, and links to the Board and Membership pages with the nitty gritty of corporate records.
  • The apache.org/dev pages are both a generic project runbook, technical issues FAQ, and partial corporate operations listing. While these are written by committers, for committers and developers, they have a lot of great information on how all sorts of things at the ASF and all Apache projects should work.
  • Another key overview of organizational documentation is the Community Development project site. This aims to be a more human-friendly signpost to find the relevant technical widget or policy information elsewhere.
  • The Apache Incubator is another important place where proper procedures are documented: this is where we try to explain to prospective new communities how an Apache project should be run before the ASF formally accepts them.

Here are some other principles and rules we follow that are important to understand.

  • Transparency. All technical decisions on Apache projects are reflected on publicly archived mailing lists. The phrase “If it didn’t happen on the list, it didn’t happen” is not just an old saying, it’s the rule at Apache.
  • Respect. One of the primary exceptions to transparency are discussions about individuals. Votes on new committers and PMC members are typically held in private lists amongst a whole PMC, since this both allows better honesty of expression, as well as prevents embarrassment in rare cases where a nominee is not voted in (yet).
  • Organizational Oversight. While the ASF relies on volunteers to produce the code that we give away, we keep it organized by having oversight: the PMCs ensure that projects are managed appropriately; the board ensures that PMCs manage themselves, and corporate officers ensure that the ASF’s corporate bits are covered.
  • Member Oversight. Members of the ASF have the final level of oversight of the board and the corporate officers. All members are allowed to review any private mailing list within the ASF, including any private@ list for projects. Members do not receive special status on any lists; merely the ability to oversee all operations. The only exceptions are specifically restricted mailing aliases that are used for legally protected communications or infrastructure root level issues.

Note that while Members have a broad oversight ability within all aspects of the ASF’s operations, organizational matters like this kind of oversight are not transparent outside of the ASF. While we certainly strive to make public as many of the great lessons we’ve learned about governing community-led software projects, the operations of governance are kept primarily within the Membership.

Partly, this is due to all the lawyers. The details of running a million-dollar corporation require a fair amount of legal work. We strive to publish as much information as is practical in things like board minutes; however the actual corporate processes are done privately.

Partly, this is because part of a meritocracy is allowing those who do to do the work. Individuals who are trusted and useful to Apache projects are elected as committers or PMC members, and therefore can help directly govern those projects. Similarly, individuals who show wisdom and effort towards the goals of the ASF may be elected as Members, and therefore can help elect the board who will appoint the officers to ensure the ASF continues running smoothly.

A great place to ask questions about these kinds of issues is the Community Development mailing list.

Dear Wibidata: The Elephant Noticed

Astute Apache Hadoop Public Committee Members have noticed local corporation WIBIDATA’s attempt to usurp our yellow elephant project mascot. We have mobilized our sources, and I have posted an official trademark complaint on their website:


Please note that the Apache (TM) Hadoop (R) yellow elephant logo is a worldwide trademark of THE APACHE GROUP, and more to the point, the elephant is very conscious of his appearance; thus we DEMAND that you remove his image from your WIBIDATA blog post immediately, forthwith, forsooth!

As a courtesy, I am leaving you this blog comment now to alert you that our army of lawyers on howdahs have already left, and should be arriving shortly at your corporate headquarters to insist on ceasing and desisting such indecipherable designs. They should arrive within a day or two.

You may have noticed that the proper Hadoop logo is always facing to the right; we have learned the hard way that our elephant is insistent at only being photographed from his RIGHT side. Pictures of Hadoop's LEFT side tend to enrage him, so we will also be sending you a bill for the racks of servers that our normally lovable elephant mascot knocked over when he saw your picture of him being jumped on by a tortise.

Note: THE APACHE GROUP only accepts cold hard cash, or properly licensed AND formatted patches. You might also want to send some peanuts as a peace offering.

Thanks for your swift... er, eventual attention to this matter,

- Shawn Curran

Trademark Architect

THE APACHE GROUP

ApacheCon presentation: Managing Apache Project Brands

At ApacheCon NA 2013 here in Portland, OR I will be talking to a packed house about how Apache projects manage branding and trademarks, to wild applause. OK, perhaps my crowd is not likely to give applause, but I’m certain it will be appreciated.

As a preview, here is the v2.0 slides of my presentation. While originally this was going to be similar to last summer’s OSCON presentation on Managing Open Source Brands, I’ve realized that the trademarks@ group at the ASF really has a very customized approach. So the slides have a very different feel, and help to show the real difference between how projects have maximum freedom – for their own technical / branding direction – but also have maximum support – because the ASF’s corporate organization stands behind their license, their trademarks, and our servers.

Managing Apache Project Brands slides (ODP

Please do let me know if you have comments on the presentation or my talk!

Slides are also posted on SlideShare.

Thank you to my Apache family

My father Steven passed away recently after a short and painful bout with pancreatic cancer. Along with a few old friends of his, many of my closest friends called or visited to help organize matters as you might expect in a situation like that. Similarly a very large number of Apache members wrote quite heartfelt emails of support and condolences.

But what struck me the most – surprised me, actually – was the knock on the door from the flower delivery. It took me a moment to realize that the ASF had sent me condolence flowers directly!

I had listed “in lieu of flowers” in the original death notice, so I wasn’t expecting anything like that. It was quite a pleasant surprise, since it was just the right kind of thing to cheer up the house at that point.

More to the point, it underscores how important community is at Apache. Not only do I know I can count on the individual support of the many friends – much like family – that I’ve met there over the years, but the ASF as an organization has a heart for it’s membership and individual contributors as well.

In any case, many thanks to my Apache family.

Obligatory note: I’m also looking forward to seeing many of my readers at ApacheCon NA in Portland, OR next week! I’ll be giving a talk on open source branding, along with many many other Apache family members.

P.S. No disrespect nor allusion to any Native American Apaches or related persons or tribes is meant.