The Apache Software Foundation Board of Directors Meeting Minutes March 19, 2003 1. Call to order The meeting was scheduled for 10am PST -0800. A sufficient attendance to constitute a quorum was recognized by the chairman at 10:14am, at which point the meeting was called to order. The meeting was held by teleconference hosted by Jim Jagielski and Covalent. IRC #apacheboard on irc.freenode.net was used for backup purposes. 2. Roll Call Directors Present: Ken Coar Jim Jagielski Sam Ruby Greg Stein Bill Stoddard Directors Absent: Brian Behlendorf Roy T. Fielding Ben Laurie Dirk-Willem van Gulik Guests: None 3. Minutes and supplements from previous meetings A. The meeting of January 22, 2003 Minutes were not available for approval. B. The meeting of February 19, 2003 Minutes were not available for approval. C. The meeting of February 26, 2003 Minutes were not available for approval. 4. Officer Reports A. Chairman [Greg] Greg reported that, in general, the individual PMCs were continuing to work well, requiring no board intervention. Greg brought the board up-to-date regarding the status of Peter Donald; the Avalon PMC is considering whether to accept Mr. Donald back into the project. Greg also reported that a growing question among some PMCs is an "old" one: what is a member and what exactly constitutes participation specifically *as* a member. B. President [Dirk] No report. C. Treasurer [Chuck] No report. D. Exec. V.P. and Secretary [Jim] Jim reported that his projects and committers pages (http://www.apache.org/~jim/) have been updated to include information on the status of signed Contributor License Agreements for all ASF committers and members. This data is available under the foundation CVS tree as clas.txt. Jim noted that even those members present when the ASF was "bootstrapped" should send in a new CLA, since what we signed back then was different enough to warrant the need for a CLA to be on file. 5. Committee Reports A. Apache APR Project [Cliff Woolley] See Attachment A. By general consent, this report was recorded as entered and approved. B. Apache Avalon Project [Nicola Ken Barozzi] See Attachment B. By general consent, this report was recorded as entered and approved. C. Apache Commons Project [Ken Coar] See Attachment C. By general consent, this report was recorded as entered and approved. D. Apache Jakarta Project [Sam Ruby] See Attachment D. By general consent, this report was recorded as entered and approved. E. Apache PHP Project [Rasmus Lerdorf] See Attachment E. By general consent, this report was recorded as entered and approved. F. Apache James Project [Serge Knystautas] See Attachment F. By general consent, this report was recorded as entered and approved. G. Web Services Project [Davanum Srinivas] See Attachment G. By general consent, this report was recorded as entered and approved. H. Apache Maven Project [Dion Gillard] See Attachment H. By general consent, this report was recorded as entered and approved. 6. Special Orders A. Resolution to change the Chair of the Apache Avalon Project WHEREAS, the membership of the Apache Avalon Project Management Committee (PMC) have nominated Berin Loritsch to serve as chairman of the Apache Avalon PMC; and WHEREAS, the previously appointed chairman of the Apache Avalon PMC, Nicola Ken Barozzi, has resigned his position as Vice President, Apache Avalon, in favor of Berin Loritsch's appointment to that position. NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that Berin Loritsch be and hereby is appointed to the office of Vice President, Apache Avalon, 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. By unanimous vote, the above resolution was passed. 7. Unfinished Business 8. New Business A. 3Genius query. See board@apache.org, message-ID <3E75E31D.8050806@Apache.Org> <> B. The Maven proposal, as presented during the supplimental meeting on February 26, 2003, was recorded as approved. 9. Announcements 10. Adjournment Scheduled to adjourn by 11:30 PDT -0800. Adjourned at 11:43am. ============ ATTACHMENTS: ============ ----------------------------------------- Attachment A: Status report for the Apache APR Project The APR Project is finally nearing a 0.9.2 release. This will allow us to make the final changes in our API prior a 1.0 release (which should follow in the near future) while minimizing headaches for our sister projects (e.g., httpd). Since our last report, we have finalized our new mission statement by unanimous vote of the Project Management Committee. The new statement is as follows: The mission of the APR project is to create and maintain software libraries that provide a predictable and consistent interface to underlying platform-specific implementations. The primary goal is to provide an API to which software developers may code and be assured of predictable if not identical behaviour regardless of the platform on which their software is built, relieving them of the need to code special-case conditions to work around or take advantage of platform-specific deficiencies or features. ----------------------------------------- Attachment B: Status report for the Apache Avalon Project * What code releases have been made? - Avalon Framework 4.1.4 - Logkit 1.2 We have a detailed roadmap of the releases to make now, mainly about Excalibur. Before getting Avalon to the next evolution phase, we want to make a release of everything we have now to support our users, so that they will have a set of Avalon deliverables guaranteed to interoperate. Apache James is working with us to ensure that the releases are done in a compatible and comprehensice way, and Stephen McConnell has been given temporary access to make modifications to James, in order to bring it in synch. Gump runs have resumed, and the projects dependent on Avalon are benefiting with succesfull Gump runs themselves, especially James and Cocoon. We are doing all the releases following the mirroring guidelines. * Any legal issues to bring to the board? None. All issues that have arised with spinoffs from the Avalon project have been resolved. *Any cross-project issues that need to be addressed? We are continuing to spinoff non-core parts of Avalon, by making the actual authors of the code make the decision. We are keeping an active eye on them to ensure that licensing is correctly taken care of. AltRMI has finally been relocated to Incubator, but has not asked for a target location. Not an issue, just a note. *Any problems with committers, members, etc? The PMC is finally starting to act cohesively, and we have managed to go through the last "crisis" mostly ourselves for the first time. ATM we don't have problems with committers or members that we cannot take care of ourselves IMO. We are working to ensure that all committers to Avalon have signed CLA on record ASAP, and have already sent notice mails. * Plans and expectations for the next period? We have a roadmap we agree on and concrete work on getting a comprehensive release of all our active code is in progress. Work on the code has resumed, and developers are working together on the same set of goals. The project is being reorganized in a more comprehensive manner and the new site starts to reflect it http://avalon.apache.org/ * etc (your own thoughts on what is important would be helpful!) I request to be lifted from my position as an Avalon chair, and that Berin Loritsch is appointment to it, as requested by the Avalon comminity per below attached vote. These months have been very difficult for Avalon, and I hope that my contribution has helped Avalon in the process of reorganization, both as a project and as a community. As many have pointed out, I'm not a "true" Avaloner, and this is one of the main reasons why I accepted to become chair. In this way the Avalon community has passed the transition period with all core developers as peers, during a "reincubation" phase. A very important thing that has happened is the explicit delegation of the 'Peter Donald' issue to the Avalon PMC, and the clear offer to give the Avalon PMC full disclosure to documents pertaining it. This has brought to the important decision to reinstantiate Peter Donald's rights, and has made all PMCers actively responsible about the issue. From the generally accepted roadmap to unification, from what I see on the mailing lists, and the way we are now handling flames, it seems to me that the initial period is over, and my job is done. As I have pointed out to the Avalon developers when I received the mandate, I would not have remained a day more than necessary, and I want to keep faith to that commitment. I hope that my efforts have been of use, thank you all. ----------------------------------------- Attachment C: Status report for the Apache Commons Project The Apache Commons project has essentially been marking time since November of 2003. There are a number of work items on the table that I hope/expect to get resolved within the next quarter; these include but are not necessarily limited to: o Setting up Subversion as the A-C CMS, instead of CVS o Importing APR-Serf, and possibly some other intra-ASF efforts o Coming to various conclusions on logistical ane infrastructural issues (e.g., relationships between components at the Web site level, the CMS module level, and the mailing list) o Refining the project bylaws and mission o Determining logical boundaries (e.g., language, function, concept, ..) and how to allow them to help the SNR without becoming obstacles to collaboration The project fell off my radar -- and apparently that of some others -- after ApacheCon in 2003, and I have been remiss until now in picking things up and getting things going again; a remission I am now correcting. ----------------------------------------- Attachment D: Status report for the Apache Jakarta Project It has been a relatively quiet three months. The ranks of the PMC have grown exponentially, but this is beginning to taper off. Code is written, newsletters are sent out (both are available from the jakarta website). Compared to previous times, mailing lists are relatively flame free. The rate of subprojects 'graduating' has slowed down too. In the past month ony one did so, and there are three subprojects awaiting incubation. I have no concerns about their rate of incubation. I fully expect to name my successor to this post some time this year. There was a call for elections this month, but no candidates emerged. I plan to continue this process until successful. ;-) ----------------------------------------- Attachment E: Status report for the Apache PHP Project The PHP project is still going strong. Since the Sept02 report approximately 1.5 million new PHP domains appeared which comprises just under 30% of all the domains Netcraft queries every month. That is up from 26% in Sept02. According to SecuritySpace.com PHP is enabled on 51.24% of all Apache servers. There is also a healthy interest in contributing to the project. In Sept02 we had 651 people with CVS accounts. Today we just passed 800. Well over half of these work exclusively on the docmentation. Since the Sept. report we have released version 4.3.0 and followed that up with a small security fix in 4.3.1. We are currently have the first release candidate of 4.3.2 out and the QA process is making slow and steady progress on it. I expect to see 4.3.2 before the end of the month. The big change with respect to Apache is that we dumped the rather unstable apache2filter sapi module replacing it with an apache2handler one mostly written by Ian Holsman and Justin Erenkrantz. We'll see if this proves to be more useful. If you want to have a look at the current code for this new handler, see: http://cvs.php.net/cvs.php/php4/sapi/apache2handler Another big push since the last report has been the pear/pecl sub-project. Here we are trying to create a useful repository of PHP code and applications easily installable via an apt-like command-line tool. Some notables from that project is the apd profiler and the new apc2 opcode cache. Having free open source profilers and opcode caches is important to the project. More info can be found at pear.php.net. The smarty sub-project is also rolling along gaining popularity. See smarty.php.net for more info. A lot of work is currently going into version 5.0 with most of the changes being to the object model. Looking for a release sometime towards the end of the year, perhaps sooner. The number of PHP-specific conferences have been increasing steadily. Here is the upcoming schedule of PHP-related conferences: Mar 20-21 Montreal - PHP Quebec 2003 Mar 29 Budapest - First Hungarian PHP Conference Apr 10-12 San Jose - MySQL Conf and Expo (not PHP, but large presence) Apr 23-25 New York - PHPCon East 2003 May 8-9 Amsterdam - 2003 International PHP conference Jul 10-13 Karlsruhe - Linuxtag 2003 (not PHP, but large PHP presence) On the user group front we have a number of extremely active groups. A shortened list of some of the more active ones: South-Eastern Michigan User Group, Stuttgart, Chicago, Frankfurt, Twin Cities, San Diego, Koeln/Bonn, Hannover, New York, Phoenix, Seattle, Vancouver, Hamburg, Kansas City, Munich, Calgary, and Long Island. All in all there are about 220 groups in 56 countries that we know about, but it is hard to keep track of which ones are active. ----------------------------------------- Attachment F: Status report for the Apache James Project Since the last board meeting, James has almost completed the migration to a top-level project, made some bug-related point releases, and discussed future project direction. The PMC has established an internal mailing list for the PMC, a public mailing list for general PMC issues, migrated the website and releases to james.apache.org, and reviewed issues of migrating CVS and existing mailing lists. There are no outstanding concerns by the PMC at this point. Following the major 2.1 release at New Year's, there have been minor point releases to correct small and major issues introduced in the push to the 2.1 release. The hard work by Peter Goldstein and Noel Bergman to improve documentation and make the code more accessible is paying off with a growing community and contributor base. The 2.1 has been branched and will likely continue to make minor point releases. Meanwhile HEAD represents what will eventually become the 3.0 release with much more sweeping changes. There have been discussion on the creation of sub-projects outside of the current "server" project. The two leading sub-projects are place for contributed mailets and a place for JavaMail provider implementations. There is little disagreement over the mailet depot project and just a question of time and priorities, and will likely model Jakarta's Taglib sub-project. There is still disagreement as to the viability and community strength for a sub-project for JavaMail providers. The drivers for a JavaMail provider sub-project would be to increase our visibility and influence with these standards and to eliminate some legal issues. The disuaders for a JavaMail provider sub-project is that these are established small communities that may be difficult to encourage the "Apache" approach, and whether these are within the scope of our project. The Jakarta Commons project would likely serve as the model for this sub-project if we do proceed. We are continually trying to improve James' dependence on Avalon for basic server functionality. We are waiting to see how the new Avalon TLP and push towards improved releases will improve the situation for James. The Avalon community has been making contributions to see that this is as painless for the James project as could be expected. ----------------------------------------- Attachment G: Status report for the Apache Web Services Project * what code releases have been made? [since the last report] 1. Apache Axis 1.1RC2 2. Apache XML-RPC 1.2-b1 * 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? Should we accept a project (OpenSAML) that requires the users (AND developers?) to get a License from RSA? See http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=incubator-general&w=2&r=1&s=OpenSAML&q=b for heated debate on this issue. The WS-PMC has VOTED in favor of accepting the project. Here's the latest reply from Rob Philpott (my RSA contact): "I'm trying to see if folks here will consider a change to the licensing terms to accommodate Apache. Unfortunately I won't be able to get all the right players together until sometime next week. So I don't have much to report at this time. I understand the issue and will update you once I have some info." * any cross-project issues that need to be addressed? none * any problems with committers, members, etc? none * plans and expectations for the next period? still working on getting more projects, establishing charter/guidelines etc. * etc (your own thoughts on what is important would be helpful!) ----------------------------------------- Attachment H: Status report for the Apache Maven Project Since the board resolution passed last week: - We've made some progress with Brian getting the infrastructure requirements underway. - Documentation is being reworked - Discussion has taken place on IRC about bylaws and how best to encourage wider participation and more open development. Nothing has yet come of this, or been committed to CVS in this respect, and we seek further guidance on this point of the resolution. - An initial roadmap document has been committed by Jason, which addresses some key concerns for Maven that the development team feel need to be addressed before a 1.0 release. http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs/jakarta-turbine-maven/xdocs/roadmap.xml?rev=HEAD&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup - There has been a source drop some code for discussion/review of various roadmap issues. - Maven continues to be an integration point for various Java build tools, and new plugins to work with the sourceforge documentation project asheklon, and to provide zsh command completion for maven were committed. - Licensing and providing useful license information from the Maven POM and ibiblio repository has also been a discussed. __________________________________________________________ End of minutes for the 19 Mar 2003 board meeting.