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.

What community will own SOFTWARE FREEDOM?

Two non-profits providing services to free and open source software projects – Software Freedom Conservancy (Conservancy) and the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) are in a dispute over the SOFTWARE FREEDOM CONSERVANCY registered trademark.

You can read the timeline of all events and my legal analysis, so now it’s time to get to the important issue: what the community effects are from the SFLC’s petition to the TTAB and the blog posts on both sides.

UPDATE: Karl Fogel and Neil McGovern have both blogged in detail on this.

Continue reading What community will own SOFTWARE FREEDOM?

Legal Issues Around SOFTWARE FREEDOM Trademarks

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) recently filed with the USPTO to cancel the registered trademark SOFTWARE FREEDOM CONSERVANCY, owned by the non-profit of the same name. Both SFLC and Conservancy have a long history together with several people working for both.

Since this is a TTAB legal proceeding – not in federal court – here’s a brief review of the legal aspects of this case, from an experienced layperson.

Continue reading Legal Issues Around SOFTWARE FREEDOM Trademarks

A SOFTWARE FREEDOM Trademark Timeline

There’s a trademark battle over the SOFTWARE FREEDOM name going on right now – and it’s not actually about the FSF.  Here’s a brief timeline of interesting facts of the case and how the two organizations are related, along with some community reactions. Reminder: this is about the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC, petitioner to cancel) and the Software Freedom Conservancy (Conservancy, the registrant of the SOFTWARE FREEDOM CONSERVANCY mark in question).

Continue reading A SOFTWARE FREEDOM Trademark Timeline

The battle for the SOFTWARE FREEDOM name

There’s a conflict happening right now over the future of what SOFTWARE FREEDOM means that you’re probably not aware of. Like many conflicts over trademarks, it’s complicated – but it’s critically important to any open source project that wants to keep their own name and branding.

By Mari Helin-Tuominen on Unsplash

Why does this matter?  Because it may affect who can call themselves SOFTWARE FREEDOM® in the marketplace.

Continue reading The battle for the SOFTWARE FREEDOM name

Apache CMS: Adding static data tables easily?

Did you know that the ASF has their own CMS / static generator / magic update system that runs the apache.org homepage and many Apache project homepages? While it’s more of an Apache infra tool rather than a full Apache top level project, it’s still a full service solution for allowing multiple static website builds that are integrated into our servers.

While there are plenty of great technical CMS systems, when choosing a system for your company, many of the questions are organizational and deployment related. How easy is it for your IT team to manage the core system? How easy is it for various teams (or projects) to store and update their own content, perhaps using different templates in the system? How can you support anonymous editing/patch submission from non-committers? Does it support a safe and processor-respectful static workflow, minimizing the load on production servers while maximizing backups? And how can you do all this with a permissive license, and only hosting your own work?

Continue reading Apache CMS: Adding static data tables easily?

Even better than Hadoop!

You know what’s even better than using Hadoop? Using Apache Hadoop!

Even better is Apache Ambari to manage your Apache Cassandra data store through Apache Hive with Apache Pig to make it simpler to write Apache Spark compute flows… Or, if you want it assembled for you, just grab the latest Apache BigTop, which already includes a bunch of Apache Hadoop related packages all together.

How can we do a better job of getting at least a single “Apache Hadoop” into some of the many media stories about Hadoop these days? It’s great that all these vendors are making great technology and projects that power big data, but with all their success and fancy marketing campaigns, you’d think we could get just a tiny bit of credit in the popular press with the actual committers on the core Apache Hadoop project itself. Or any of the other Apache project technologies that these vendors, other software companies – and just about every other company too – rely on every day to help make their websites work.

Would it hurt marketers and journalists and bloggers to throw in just one extra “Apache” before talking about the many free Apache software products that help power more than half the internet?

The ASF and Apache projects give away a tremendous amount of technology every day under our permissive Apache license – always for free. All we ask is respect for our trademarks, and a little bit of credit for the many volunteer communities that build Apache software.

P.S. Apache projects love to get more code, documentation, testing, and other contributions too! And the ASF has a Sponsorship program.

But what we we really want is what every human wants: just a little love. Just an extra Apache here and there makes us feel better.

Thanks!

What is Apache Hadoop?

There’s a lot of excitement around Hadoop software these days, here’s my definition of what “Hadoop” means:

Hadoop ™ is the ASF’s trademark for our Apache Hadoop software product that provides a service and simple programming model for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of commodity computers. Many people view Hadoop as the software that started the current “Big Data” processing model, which allows programmers to easily and effectively process huge data sets to get meaningful results.

The best place of all to learn about Hadoop is of course the Apache Hadoop project and community, which says this about the Hadoop software:

“(Hadoop) is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage. Rather than rely on hardware to deliver high-availability, the library itself is designed to detect and handle failures at the (simple to program) application layer, so delivering a highly-available service on top of a cluster of computers, each of which may be prone to failures.”

The Apache Hadoop project at the ASF is related to or has created a large number of notable modules, subprojects, or full projects at Apache, including:

There are a wide variety of vendors who provide Hadoop-related software, however the only source for Hadoop software itself is the Apache Hadoop project here at the ASF. We certainly appreciate the many companies who allow their employees to contribute work to Apache Hadoop and all of our projects, and also to the many Apache Corporate Sponsors. However I do hope that companies working in the Hadoop and related Big Data industry take stock of their marketing strategies, and ensure that their corporate marketing doesn’t shortchange the credit owed to the Apache Hadoop community itself.

We very much appreciate those corporate supporters who do provide plenty of credit to the ASF and the Apache Hadoop community – both the old hats, and the very new spinoff in the Big Data space. I just hope that some of the other players in the industry will carefully consider their public crediting (or lack thereof) to the ASF’s Hadoop brand and the many individual committers and contributors to the Apache Hadoop project.

As always, the Apache Hadoop website and mailing lists are the best place to learn about Hadoop software!

Oh, and remember:

Apache Hadoop, Hadoop, the yellow elephant logo, the names of Apache software products, and Apache are either registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries