Tag: governance

Maintaining ASF Project Independence

A key differentiator of the Apache Way versus other Foundations is our project independence from vendor control. Users can trust that projects adopted by the ASF will be governed long-term for the benefit of the whole contributor community. ASF projects are also immune from licensing changes away from open source licenses, since the ASF only ever uses the Apache-2.0 license. Even in the case of projects that get deprecated or lose sufficient community to maintain the code, the ASF ensures that all project resources will remain read-only in the Apache Attic forever.

A key question then is, how does the ASF ensure project independence? While independent governance isn’t an issue for many projects, the ASF has certainly had it’s share of projects built in fast-moving commercially successful technology areas. As companies change direction, build up marketing campaigns, and buyout competitors, their messaging has sometimes been seen as being a controlling force around core techologies – including, sometimes, ASF projects.

The ASF has several of methods to ensure independent governance in our projects, even in the face of extreme vendor pressures. While governance changes often take time in broad-based communities, these three pillars are the building blocks of the ASF’s independent ethos – and serve as a backstop to all Apache projects. I wrote about these three pillars for a recent ASF board meeting, lightly edited here.

Three Pillars Of Independence At Apache

1. The ASF Membership

Our hundreds of ASF Members are individuals (never corporations) from around the world and from all walks of life. Members are nominated privately within the existing Membership and elected annually by other individual members. Nominations and elections are based on their positive contributions to ASF projects, and their willingness to promote the public good when making decisions for their projects. A nominee’s employment or contributions outside the ASF are not a factor in electing new Members.

These hundreds of Members provide a technical and community mentoring
backbone to all of our projects, as well as a focus on our mission for
the public good. Many Members continue to volunteer across multiple ASF projects, and across various employers during their careers. Since Membership is permanent, a key cadre of Members from the first 10 years of the ASF’s history are still involved with governance and mentoring, providing a rich and fiercely independent culture.

2. Apache Project Trademarks

The ASF owns all trademarks on behalf of our project communities. The Apache brand benefits our projects and the ASF as a whole, given our strong brand recognition for independent and welcoming communities building software openly. Potential contributors know what to expect from any Apache project, and that with their contributions to the project, they’ll have a fair chance at being elected to a project’s PMC to help govern that project in the future.

Protecting the Apache brand – and the brands of all Apache projects – is a key focus of the ASF as a whole. Since the ASF as a nonprofit owns all trademarks of our projects, we have the ability to ensure that users always know where to get official Apache software products. While users are welcome to fork our code – it’s under Apache-2.0 as always – they may not fork our trademarks.

3. The Apache Board

The nine member ASF Board is elected annually from within the ASF Membership. Board elections are competitive and are based on individual Directors’ contributions to the ASF as a whole, not for outside activities and never for commercial affiliations. Since Board elections are private within the Membership, there is no chance for commercial interests outside the ASF to influence our annual Board elections, or the independent culture that our Board holds dear.

Every ASF project reports directly to the ASF board on a quarterly basis. Directors read all reports, and may have comments or suggestions for project governance when they are needed. This regular contact between projects and the board ensures that project governance is always at top of mind.

From time to time some commercial vendors have abused the ASF’s trademarks and goodwill for a vendor’s sole benefit, at a cost to the community as a whole. At other times, vendors have worked to bend project governance for their own benefit, either by hiring project contributors or by having their employees who are contributors unduly influence project direction.

In each of these cases, the independent ASF Board serves as a backstop to ensure projects are governed for the public good. While the board doesn’t make technical changes in projects (that would be silly, anyway), the board maintains Project Management Committee membership lists, and in rare cases can make corrections when needed. Similarly, the board and VP, Brand Management work to ensure that Apache trademarks are respected and reserved for the actual project communities that have done the work, not associated vendors.

The Board and our many volunteer officers’ efforts to preserve project
independence are not always visible publicly, but rest assured: Apache
projects are governed for the public good. While governance mentoring and corrections sometimes take time, the ASF board will always be here to ensure all our projects are truly working for the public good.

Open Collective Foundation Shutdown Explainer

The open source community was surprised today by the announcement that the Open Collective Foundation is dissolving by the end of 2024. Since OCF is a popular charitable fiscal host for 600 collectives (including a handful of software ones), this is quite a surprise and a large disappointment.

IMPORTANT: Open Collective has written up an excellent comprehensive guide for finding and moving to a new fiscal host, as well as a list of fiscal hosts to consider for any collectives affected.

The OCF has built at matching tool for their collectives – if you work at a fiscal host, especially a public charity, please check it out!

Continue reading Open Collective Foundation Shutdown Explainer

Open Source help and ideas wanted!

I’ve been working on a several different projects related to sustainability and governance in nonprofits, trying to explain larger concepts and build up some worthy datasets in some specific FOSS areas. There are so many good ideas, and so little time and coding that I have to give. So I realized… I should just try asking for help!

The appeal of open source for me is that I can contribute when I have time/energy/expertise, and when $real-life gets in the way, I can step back. The other appeal is everything’s in the open, so even if no-one answers, I might as well detail a few tasks I’d love help with figuring out – or even better, building!

FOSS Foundations Metadata Directory

Inspired by the FLOSS Foundations Directory, I wantstemed to start storing some structured data about the non-profit foundations that provide services to much of the open source ecosystem. This, the FOSS Foundation Metadata directory! I’ve currently collected basic organizational data on 50+ notable foundations out there, like board size, where incorporated, links to common kinds of policies, and the like. While there are various other listings of foundations or projects out there, few are structured data and none really track the legal, corporate, and funding details I’m working on. Similarly, while there’s plenty of academic research on community governance, it would be great to explicitly quantify governance models at foundations and major projects, to help see how they differ.

For US-based nonprofit foundations, we can fairly easily get top-level finances through IRS 990 filings. ProPublica’s nonprofit explorer (yay!) makes it easy to get core 990 data, which I’ve organized and incorporated some rough finances into the metadata directory. There’s a lot more visualization we can do here: while 990 forms are high level – total contributions/total revenue and the like – they are an apples-to-apples way to compare funding and expenses of US nonprofits.

Where does funding come from? Sponsorships, mainly: I’ve also reviewed and categorized the sponsorship prospectuses of many foundations to quantify both donation levels, as well as benefits provided for sponsorship levels. Once we can get a broader cross-section of foundations around the world represented, it will be some very interesting data. And thanks to Duane O’Brien who’s done some historical research of FOSS sponsorship prospectuses!

Help Wanted!

There’s interest from practicioners and researchers alike looking at sustainability here. But we need more time in the day – or more contributors! – to keep building out both our data coverage as well as linting, visualizations, and the like. If this is a topic that interests you, please head over to the GitHub Issues page and jump in! We could use help with setting up OpenAPI for the researchers and Ecosyste.ms, as well as linting, basic visualizations, and especially helping to add new foundations and categorize existing ones in new ways. For example, we have several metadata fields for policies, including links to Codes Of Conduct, as well as where a COC link is shown (i.e., is it prominent?).

Do You Work With Nonprofit Finances?

If so, let’s chat. In another life I’m involved with a hyperlocal nonprofit news website, so I’ve been relying on ProPublica and various scraping tools to help build up some pictures of local news organization finances. While ProPublica is great for top-line fields in 990s, it takes work to XPath your way into the guts of 990 schedules. The Giving Tuesday project seems to have a magic data lake project coming soon that might solve all these issues for us – but I’d love to have alternate perspectives on how to extract and analyze IRS 990 data at small/medium scales.

Also – are you a European or other non-US country nonprofit expert? How do you analyze finances across different organizations? While US 990 forms aren’t perfect, at least they’re (reasonably) consistent, and are easy enough to analyze at scale. Are there any similar broad based ways to gather nonprofit finances elsewhere?

Where Is The ASF Going? Director Q&A

With Apache board elections coming up soon, an ASF Member came up with a great set of questions for all director candidates. With permission, I’m sharing those questions here, and providing my answers as well.

I’ve also posted my own Director Position Statement for this year (and past years!).

Continue reading Where Is The ASF Going? Director Q&A

What Apache Needs In Foundation Members

As the ASF’s Annual Member’s Meeting approaches this month, the Membership has an opportunity to vote in new individual Members to the Foundation. I’ve written about how member meetings work and have proposed some process improvements.

But the bigger question is: how can the membership better help the ASF succeed? What a Member can do at the ASF is documented, but what should Members consider doing? Where does the ASF need Members to help out, and how?

Continue reading What Apache Needs In Foundation Members

Three React-ions to the Facebook PATENTS License

There are really three aspects to your project’s decision (to use React.js or not based on the BSD+Patents license), and it’s important to consider each of them. You really need to consider which aspects are important to your project’s success — and which ones don’t really matter to you.
(See the updated FAQ about the PATENTS issue on Medium!)

  • Legal — both details of the license and PATENTS file that Facebook offers React.js under, and some realistic situations where the patent clauses might actually come into play (which is certainly rare in court, but it’s the chilling effect of uncertainty that’s the issue)
  • Technology — are other libraries sufficiently functional to provide the features your project needs? Does a project have the capacity to make a change, if they decided to?
  • Community — how does the rest of the open source community-of-communities see the issue, and care about your choices? This includes both future buyers of a startup, as well as future partners, as well as future talent (employees) or contributors (open source developers).

Continue reading Three React-ions to the Facebook PATENTS License

What Apache needs in a Board

The ASF is holding it’s annual member’s meeting soon, where we will elect a new 9-member Board of Directors for a one-year term.  I’ve been honored with a nomination to run for the board again, as have a number of other excellent Member candidates.  While I’m writing my nomination statement – my 2016 director statement and earlier ones are posted – I’ve been thinking about what Apache really needs in a board to manage the growth of our projects and to improve our operations.

Continue reading What Apache needs in a Board

Behind the scenes at Apache: Corporate Org Chart

This post has been improved and turned into the ASF’s official Corporate Governance Organization Chart overview – please see the new version there!

You probably use contribute to several Apache projects.  But do you know what goes on behind the scenes at the ASF?  Besides all the work of the 200+ project communities, the ASF has an annual budget of about one $million USD to fund the services our projects use.  How we manage providing these services – and governing the corporation behind the projects – continues to change and improve.

Continue reading Behind the scenes at Apache: Corporate Org Chart

How Apache *really* works

How much do you know about the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and the many Apache projects we host? Did you know we’re holding our annual Members meeting to elect our board of directors and new Members in just a few days?

I’m often surprised by the variety of basic questions and misunderstandings I hear in the software world about how the ASF really works. We’ve written plenty of documentation about the Apache Way and our governance, but let’s try a different approach. I’d like to interview myself to try to explain some things. Continue reading How Apache *really* works

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