The Apache Software Foundation Board of Directors Meeting Agenda February 19, 2003 1. Call to order The meeting is scheduled for 10am PST -0800 and will begin as soon thereafter that a sufficient attendance to constitute a quorum is recognized by the chairman. The meeting will be held by teleconference hosted by Ben Hyde and Intuit: US Number : 800-988-5173 (650-944-4444) International : Passcode/ConfID : 404404 IRC #apacheboard on irc.freenode.net will be used for backup purposes. 2. Roll Call Directors Present: Brian Behlendorf Roy T. Fielding Dirk-Willem van Gulik Ben Laurie Sam Ruby Greg Stein Bill Stoddard Directors Absent: Ken Coar Jim Jagielski Guests: Ben Hyde Chuck Murcko Davanum Srinivas 3. Minutes and supplements from previous meetings A. The meeting of December 18, 2002 See board_minutes_2002_12_18.txt in cvs.apache.org:/home/cvs board. B. The meeting of January 22, 2002 -- minutes not yet available 4. Officer Reports A. Chairman [Greg] Greg reported that he mostly worked with Jakarta issues, in particular, Maven. B. President [Dirk] Dirk has been working an issue with a number of books using Apache text without copyrights. This appears to have been an oversight, and is rapidly being addressed. Dirk has been working with the CEBIT show. Regarding the question of whether Maven.org outside scope of Apache: discussion deferred to 6.2 on the agenda. There has been an upsurge in interest in Wikis lately. The plan is to associate every Apache resource with a responsible PMC. C. Treasurer [Chuck] Current balance is Almost-CD $114,308.75 + checking $747.70... accounting for contributions received and bills payable, the new balance of the Almost CD will be $110.708.25. QuickBooks will need to be registered. D. Exec. V.P. and Secretary [Jim] No report. 5. Committee Reports A. Apache HTTP Server Project [Ben Hyde] See Attachment A Additionally, Ben noted that the HTTP Server project is slowly moving some PMC members to emeritus status. B. Apache Perl Project [Doug MacEachern] No report. C. Apache XML Project [Ted Leung] See Attachment C In response to the issues raised by this report: Roy indicated that license by ref is not acceptable with the current license. Dirk will capture a list of licenses approved to be committed to the foundation's web site, Dirk will determine the mechanism for providing input. Roy will create a mailing list for the everyone (both inside and outside) the ASF to participate in licensing discussions. Brian suggests waiting until the 2.0 license is published. Brian volunteered to apply fixes to the the set of known outstanding issues within the next week. Roy will draft a resolution to move security back to xml from ws. Dirk is concerned about AxKit not using the same ASF infrastructure and not interacting with other ASF projects. Greg took an action to talk to the XML PMC. D. Fund-raising Committee [Chuck Murcko] See Attachment D E. Apache Cocoon Project [Stefano Mazzocchi] See Attachment E F. Apache James Project [Serge Knystautas] No report. G. Web Services Project [Davanum Srinivas] See Attachment G As the WS PMC is looking to fold in OpenSAML, and jUDDI, Dims inquired about an ASF position on patents and reciprical licensing... after significant discussion, this was tabled... Brian took the action to capture the issues that need to be resolved. By unanimous consent of the directors present, all reports that were recieved were approved as received. 6. Other Reports A. Sam Ruby -- discussions with the PHP Group Requirements of being an ASF project include copyright assignment and to only have dependencies which does not further encumber ASF users. We searched for other conditions, but no consensus as to other conditions. Sam Ruby to convey to the PHP group the following sentiment: The board is deeply concerned and would like to bring this issue to closure quickly. Issues around the natures of the copyright and how this relates to users of ASF projects is something the board is trying to resolve at this time. B. Status update on Peter Donald's suspension. Peter is to be reinstated into Avalon only. 7. Special Orders A. The infrastructure committee seeks permission to procure a server side certificate signed by a CA which is to be recognized by a broad set of web browsers for use with HTTPS. Requested is the approval of a one time expenditure of up to US$1000 (one thousand US dollars) for the procurement of an SSL cert with a validity of at least a year. This resolution passes by unanimous concent of the directers present. Present at the time of the vote: Brian, Roy, Dirk, Sam, Greg, Bill B. Resolution to create the Maven PMC WHEREAS, the Board of Directors deems it to be in the best interests of the Foundation and consistent with the Foundation's purpose to establish a Project Management Committee charged with the creation and maintenance of open-source software related to Java software development, maintenance, and comprehension, for distribution at no charge to the public. NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that a Project Management Committee (PMC), to be known as the "Maven PMC", be and hereby is established pursuant to Bylaws of the Foundation; and be it further RESOLVED, that the Maven PMC be and hereby is responsible for the creation and maintenance of software related to Java software development, maintenance, and comprehension, based on software licensed to the Foundation; and be it further RESOLVED, that the office of "Vice President, Maven" be and hereby is created, the person holding such office to serve at the direction of the Board of Directors as the chair of the Maven PMC, and to have primary responsibility for management of the projects within the scope of responsibility of the Maven PMC; and be it further RESOLVED, that the persons listed immediately below be and hereby are appointed to serve as the initial members of the Maven PMC: Dion Gillard Pete Kazmier Bob McWhirter James Strachan Jason van Zyl NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Jason van Zyl be and hereby is appointed to the office of Vice President, Maven, to serve in accordance with and subject to the direction of the Board of Directors and the Bylaws of the Foundation until death, resignation, retirement, removal or disqualification, or until a successor is appointed; and be it further RESOLVED, that the initial Maven PMC be and hereby is tasked with the creation of a set of bylaws intended to encourage open development and increased participation in the Maven Project; and be it further RESOLVED, that the initial Maven PMC be and hereby is tasked with the migration and rationalization of the Jakarta PMC Turbine Maven subproject; and be it further RESOLVED, that all responsibility pertaining to the Jakarta Turbine Maven sub-project encumbered upon the Jakarta PMC be hereafter discharged. This resolution was tabled due to lack of time. 8. Unfinished Business 9. New Business A. Migration of XML Security back to XML PMC WHEREAS, the XML Security sub-project has requested to remain within the purview of the XML Project Management Committee (PMC) rather than the Web Services PMC, as assigned on 22 Jan 2003. NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that all responsibility pertaining to the XML Security sub-project be and hereby is encumbered upon the XML PMC; and be it further RESOLVED, that all responsibility pertaining to the XML Security sub-project encumbered upon the Web Services PMC be hereafter discharged. This resolution passed by unamimous consent of the directors present. 10. Announcements Brian requested feedback on the colo proposal sent to the board. 11. Adjournment The meeting was ajourned at 11:53 PST. ============ ATTACHMENTS: ============ ----------------------------------------- Attachment A: Status report for the Apache HTTP Server Project Things are good in HTTPD land. Our most serious challenge is bringing more middleware et. al. that complements 1.3 forward into 2.0. A useful discussion on this topic spun up in response to an article where in Greg was interviewed. It's a good how hard folks in HTTPD labor to try to keep discussions on an even keel. The board floated the suggestion that the PMC might look into ways to reduce the number of PMC members who are currently engaged at a low level in the actual evolution of the server. This spawned a conversation that finally reached the conclusion that the chair would take the action of collecting data to identify the PMC members that appear to low intensity and then chat them up to urge their voluntary transition to emertitus. Should that not work we would then be likely to 'just' move some people into the emeritus category; i.e. those from whom we have heard nothing for a year or more. Not just because it's an issue beyond our brief, we did not intend that these actions would effect anyone membership in the foundation. I, the chair, am making surprisingly good progress on collecting volunteers but this work got delayed due to some issues that arose in the rest of my life. As a side effect of my collecting the data on activity level I found it interesting that activity of individuals in the project over the last year suggests a power-law distribution: level_of_contribution = 1 / ( rank_order_of_contributor + A ) ^ B Where level_of_contribution is must # of things, postings, commits, etc. and rank_order is just the index of individual contributors sequenced by that score. I consider it an excelent sign of health that A is appoximatly 10; i.e. that we are not dominated by one or two very large contributors. It would be nicer if B were smaller that 1.7, i.e the drop off sharp. ----------------------------------------- Attachment B: Status report for the Apache Perl Project [missing] ----------------------------------------- Attachment C: Status report for the Apache XML Project The following people have been added to the XML PMC to make representation project based: * Axkit * Kip Hampton * Matt Sergeant * Commons * Shane Curcuru * FOP * Peter B. West * Jeremias Maerki * Forrest * Jeff Turner * Steven Noels * Xalan * Ilene Seelemann * Santiago Pericas-Geertsen * Xerces-C * Gareth Reakes * PeiYong? Zhang * Xerces-J * Andy Clark * Neil Graham * Xerces-P * Jason Stewart * Xindice * Gianugo Rabellino * Kimbro Staken Batik is in the process of finding a representative. This report is the first from the new PMC. Issues needing attention: There is still a lot of confusion over licensing policy. The common questions are: 1. Is is okay to use the short license 2. Can we include software that uses license foo It would be a big help if these issues could be resolved by placing the definitive answers on a web page. --- Axkit Following a short lull while various committers coped with the largely uninteresitng details of Real Life, AxKit development has renewed with vigor. Version 1.6.1 (a bugfix and minor features release) was announced on Feb. 28th 2003 and we are currently accepting feature requests for v 1.7 Recent highlights include: * Release of version 1.6.1 * Public, Open Source release of the previously commercial-only OpenOffice.org file format Provider (allows users to trasparently publish/transform XML content form unaltered OpenOffice documents). * Revamped user Wiki and new volunteers to help manage it. * Updated site design. Perhaps the most exciting news from the last months (from a non-rechnical point of view) is AxKit's appearance in February's Security Space Apache Modules Report-- indicating a marked increase in the number of sites running AxKit worldwide. --- Batik --- Commons The xml-commons project has continued in it's slow growth over the past quarter; with some luck and timing, we'll be doing a lot more in the coming quarter. The biggest news is our policy change to a per-tool release system. Once we finish the appropriate doc work, we'll have releases for each of the separate components we currently have in xml-commons: xml-apis.jar, resolver.jar, and which.jar. We've added one new committer, Norman Walsh, who donated his popular XML catalog Resolver tool to the xml-commons project. We've had the 1.0 release of resolver.jar, and after incorporating user feedback we'll have a second release very soon. Development on the xml-apis.jar (the external, standards-based portion of xml-commons: JAXP, SAX, and DOM interfaces) is taking place on two main branches. The HEAD branch has mostly the latest-and-greatest code of each standard; there isn't much current work happening here. The primary work is happening on the tck-jaxp-1_2_0 branch, where committers from both Xerces-J and Xalan-J are updating code to pass the appropriate Sun-provided TCK test compatibility kit for JAXP 1.2. As soon as we have this finished, we'll have an xml-apis.jar release that we know will pass the TCK and that any Apache projects wish to use can pull down. The other big news has been David Crossley's great work on forrestizing the doc set for xml-commons, including working with the forrest community to better support our multi-project doc needs. --- FOP * November 2002: * New committer: Victor Mote * EXSLFO: Community effort to standardize on XSL-FO extensions among different XSL-FO implementations (EXSLT as role model) * December 2002: * Version 0.20.5 Release Candidate * January 2003: * Kick off for "new FOP logo" contest (until the end of February) * February 2003: * Version 0.20.5 Release Candidate 2 FOP maintains 2 main development tracks: * Maintenance branch: That's the branch where our current releases come from. Version 0.20.5 is planned to be the last coming from the maintenance branch. We're in bugfixing-only mode, as far as this is possible because of our demanding users. * Redesign in the trunk: Started about 16 (or so) months ago. * A third branch is about the redesign of an important part of FOP. It is expected to soon be integrated with the redesign. Given our limited resources we're having trouble bringing the redesign forward. From time to time the whole redesign descision is attacked but lately, there wasn't enough power anymore to power that discussion. So we hope that the whole team can concentrate on the redesign once 0.20.5 is out (expected 2003-02-28). We still haven't convinced all developers (in contrast to committers) to join the redesign effort but we're making progress. In short, we suffer from the problem of a huge user base and only a small set of active developers and committers. The good news is that the redesigned FOP does already handle the most important things even if its progress is slow. We hope to make a developer release 1.0 this year. We have one big problem right now: We've realized that most of our hyphenation pattern files must be removed from CVS because of licences. The files were mostly adapted from Tex hyphenation files. Some are GPL, some LPPL (not LGPL!) and some have something else with occasional commercial-use restrictions. We're in the process of resolving these issues. We may need help from higher up, I guess. We'll get in touch --- Forrest In (just over) the last 3 months, Forrest has been rapidly progressing, and has made its first three major releases ([1] [2] [3]), using the new mirrors system. Progress has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and backwards-compatibility has been maintained across releases. Community-wise, Forrest has gained a fair number of new users, and many technically astute contributors on the mailing list. However, core development has remained limited to a handful of people, and no new committers have been nominated. Symbiosis with Cocoon remains strong. Bug reporting was moved to a JIRA install on Steven's box[4], which also hosts Forrest's prototype continuous build tool, Forrestbot[5]. Licensing seems to all be in order. The few non-ASF jars in use all have licenses in legal/, and all seem innocuous. [1] 0.2: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=xml-apache-announce&m=103746673310573&w=2 [2] 0.3: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=xml-apache-announce&m=104399934113331&w=2 [3] 0.4: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=jakarta-announce&m=104510734501302&w=2 [4] http://issues.cocoondev.org/jira/secure/Dashboard.jspa [5] http://forrestbot.cocoondev.org/ --- Xalan-C ++ A second committer: Berin Lautenbach has joined David Bertoni to work on Xalan-C++! An interim build, built with Xerces 2.1 was released at the end of October, 2002. --- Xalan-J/XSLTC Two new committers: Gordon Chiu and Ramesh Mandava have joined the team. Active work is happening on 3 branches. Currently, the HEAD branch is focused mainly on bug fixes. A developers release is planned for the end of this week. The XSLTC_DTM branch is focused on the integration of the DTM and serializers so Xalan-J and XSLTC can synchronize on a more common code base. The XSLT20 branch is where the implementation of the XSLT2.0 and XPath 2.0 drafts is continuing in earnest! --- Xerces-C++ New committer: Gareth Reakes. Xerces-C++ 2.2.0 was released at the early Feb, 2003. --- Xerces-J Things have been relatively quiet in Xerces-J land in the last three months: in mid-November, we released version 2.2.1, which was primarily a bugfix release; and in late January, we released 2.3.0. The latter release is noteworthy because it marks the stabilization of the Xerces Native Interface. --- Xerces-P --- Xindice Xindice is slowly warming up again after a period of little activity. We are now getting closer to a release of version 1.1, with a beta due in the next few days. More important, however, the committers are ready to face the challenge of moving to version 2.0, with possibly a different (more componentized) architecture and a change in the internal database system. The last three months were spent in finishing up the XML-RPC layer and the embedded driver, squashing some annoying bugs with XUpdate, moving the documentation to Forrest and getting ready to have a 1.1 release with a couple of significant improvements over 1.0: UTF-8 compliance and drop of CORBA in favor of XML-RPC. I think no new committers were voted in in this period. --- XML-Security XML Security has been ping-ponged between WS and XML. We expect XML Security to return to XML after the 2/19/2003 Board meeting ----------------------------------------- Attachment D: Status report for the Fund-raising Committee The Fundraising Committee has decided to begin accepting donations to the Foundation via PayPal. An email alias and PayPal account are set up, and a revised contributions page is available for review at http://cvs.apache.org/~chuck/build/site/docs/foundation/contributing.html Once review is complete the page will be deployed and we can start accepting PayPal donations. Jinx artwork has also been received and added to the contributions page. We have not yet reached the threshold of receiving funds from Jinx sales; that point should be reached in the next 30-45 days. Next stage ideas for fundraising will be solicited over the next few weeks. ----------------------------------------- Attachment E: Status report for the Apache Cocoon Project The Cocoon Project is slowly starting up. We are in the progress of establishing the voting rules (taken from Avalon) so that we can start the PMC. The PMC mail list has not been setup yet. I wanted to have the voting rules resolved in public (means cocoon-dev) before asking instrastructure@ to setup the pmc@cocoon.apache.org mail list. Our policy will be to reduce traffic on pmc@cocoon.apache.org to only those discussions that *require* privacy. Everything else will be done in public. The first PMC action will be to resolve the 'recursive bylaws' issue. The second PMC action will be to establish a policy for the potential use of the Cocoon name on commercial interests or cocoon-related non-ASF web sites. Infrastructure-wise, we are slowly moving away from our current xml.apache.org location into cocoon.apache.org but we want to plan ahead the movement to reduce user damage (broken links, mail archives and such). Mirroring is also working even if not all links in our docs has been updated (we plan on doing that after the move) Pier Fumagalli has been voted back as a Cocoon committer (after his renewed intention to work on cocoon and several patches submitted) and is helping us a lot with infrastructure issues directly, reducing the work on infrastructure@ directly. At the same time, we would like to work with the other new top-level project to synchronize the process of writing such PMC-oriented docs and such. I'm peronally keeping an eye on infrastructure@ community@ and general@incubator for those things and cocoon and avalon are already sharing pieces of PMC-related work. We are also planning to start using Forrest to build our own documentation, even if this will make it a circular dependency (cocoon depends on forrest and forrest depends on cocoon). But this is something the cocoon documentation team will decide with the forrest developers (most of which are also cocoon developers). As far as community information, the cocoon communities appear healthy, active and friendly. The high-rate of users becoming committers and committers coming out of emerius status indicates a sane darwinistic environment, well matched by the fact that only individuals or small-sized companies perform most of Cocoon development and maintance, allowing the community to be in total control. Frinction rate and ego-oriented problems are, as usual, close to zero and I see no signs of problems ahead. - o - As a special note, I would like to mention how the introduction of the Cocoon wiki (hosted personally by Steven Noels' web site www.cocoondev.org) has been seen by the user community as a great tool and has generated very high-quality and useful documentation. The cocoon wiki was also patched to sends diffs to the cocoon-docs@xml.apache.org mail list (the documentation team), providing ownership and oversight. This is seen as a very useful tool by the documentation team. This has let us to believe that our current xml-driven documentation system must be improved to match the editing simplicity of a wiki-based solution, but without the unstructured-text problems of wiki content. My personal vision is that Forrest should be dealing with those issues and Cocoon help them with the technology they need, but that a better documentation editing infrastructure is needed in order to allow a more general audience to help us with that task. ----------------------------------------- Attachment F: Status report for the Apache James Project [missing] ----------------------------------------- Attachment G: Status report for the Apache Web Services Project * what code releases have been made? [since the last report] 1. Apache Axis 1.1RC1 2. Apache WSIF 2.0 * any new projects in process of being accepted? 1. OpenSAML (Currently working with Incubator Folks - Proposal @ http://nagoya.apache.org/wiki/apachewiki.cgi?OpenSAMLProposal) 2. JUDDI (Currently working on the proposal, see draft @ http://nagoya.apache.org/wiki/apachewiki.cgi?ProposalForJUDDI) * any legal issues to bring to the board? none so far. talking to RSA for SAML RF licensing (http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=incubator-general&m=104507713330199&w=2) needed for OpenSAML * any cross-project issues that need to be addressed? XML-Security was moved into WS-PMC as there was no objection from XML-Security folks when WS-PMC was being established. Now XML-Security folks want to "go back" to XML-PMC. They had a VOTE and notified WS-PMC of their intent. * any problems with committers, members, etc? none * plans and expectations for the next period? working on getting more projects, establishing charter/guidelines etc. * etc (your own thoughts on what is important would be helpful!) __________________________________________________________ End of minutes for the 19 Feb 2003 board meeting.