The Apache Software Foundation Board of Directors Meeting Minutes March 30, 2005 1. Call to order The meeting was scheduled for 10:00 PST -0800 and was begun at 10:04 when a sufficient attendance to constitute a quorum was recognized by the chairman. The meeting was held teleconference, hosted by Jim Jagielski and Covalent. IRC #asfboard on irc.freenode.net will be used for backup purposes. 2. Roll Call Directors Present: Brian Behlendorf Jim Jagielski Geir Magnusson Jr. Stefano Mazzocchi (arrived 10:07) Sam Ruby Greg Stein Sander Striker Directors Absent: Ken Coar Dirk-Willem van Gulik Guests: Chuck Murcko (Treasurer) 3. Minutes from previous meetings A. The meeting of December 15, 2004 SVN - foundation/board/board_minutes_2004_12_15.txt Greg indicated that he had some additional information to add the the minutes in SVN. This agenda item was tabled. B. The meeting of January 19, 2005 SVN - foundation/board/board_minutes_2005_01_19.txt Minutes board/board_minutes_2005_01_19.txt approved by general consent. C. The meeting of February 23, 2005 SVN - foundation/board/board_minutes_2005_02_23.txt There was a lot of confusion regarding these minutes. Although committed to SVN, and seen by at least 2 board members, it did not appear in SVN. The minutes were to be re-committed. As such, this agenda item was tabled. 4. Officer Reports A. Chairman [Greg] Greg reported that there was nothing really to report. B. President [Dirk] No report. C. Treasurer [Chuck] Lockbox services are once again getting attention from WF. Expenses above and beyond normal last month included $5000 for infrastructure meeting support, $1302 for new equipment, and $299 to CSC for annual corporate filing. Contributions for approximately $4900 were received, including $2350 from UC and approximately $2000 from car sales. Contact information has been filed with Car Program LLC. Current balances (as of 02/22/2005): Paypal $2947.12 Checking $15287.84 Premium Mkt. $100286.26 Total $118521.22 D. Exec. V.P. and Secretary [Jim] We are seeing the steady drip of incoming iCLAs and the occasional CCLA; these are being logged. The office received a few checks from Car Program LLC, as well as an invoice from CSC, which have been forwarded to Chuck, who has noted his receipt of them. 5. Committee Reports A. Apache APR Project [Cliff Woolley] See Attachment A No submitted report. B. Apache Excalibur Project [Leo Simons] See Attachment B Apache Excalibur Project report approved as submitted by general consent. C. Apache Gump Project [Stefan Bodewig] See Attachment C Apache Gump Project report approved as submitted by general consent. D. Infrastructure Team [Sander Striker] See Attachment D Infrastructure Team report approved as submitted by general consent. E. Apache Jakarta Project [Henri Yandell] See Attachment E It was noted that there was some discussion in the tomcat-dev list on requesting Tomcat be moved to a TLP. Apache Jakarta Project report approved as submitted by general consent. F. Apache Lucene Project [Doug Cutting] See Attachment F No submitted report. G. Apache Portals Project [Santiago Gala] See Attachment G Apache Portals Project report approved as submitted by general consent. H. Apache SpamAssassin Project [Daniel Quinlan] See Attachment H Apache SpamAssassin Project report approved as submitted by general consent. I. Apache Web Services Project [Davanum Srinivas] See Attachment I Apache Web Services Project report approved as submitted by general consent. J. Apache XMLBeans Project [Cliff Schmidt] See Attachment J No submitted report. 6. Special Orders It was noted that there was a desire to discuss Batis, but this was tabled in the interests of time. 7. Discussion Items None. 8. Unfinished Business None. 9. New Business There was a long discussion regarding (or re-regarding) the topic of the ASF obtaining an Executive Director. There were 3 main opinions: (1) That the ASF requires a "true" Executive Director (ED) with position, title and "power" normally associated with such; (2) That the ASF requires an Administrative Assisstant (AA), to help with such items as Fund Raising, etc; (3) That the ASF is doing fine as it is. The main voiced concern regarding an ED is that it would be unprecedented for any single individual within the ASF to be so publically known as "Mr./Ms. ASF." The ASF has historically actively avoided any single person being uniquely so distinguished or acknowledged. There is the concern on how this would affect the developer and user community. The main voiced concern regarding an AA is that the person would lack any real power or authority with which to do their job. One topic in the discussion which seemed to strike a chord with most directors is the need for someone who has the time and bandwidth to "stay on the ball" regarding issues. Other than that, there was no real consensus within the board, being split maybe 3-3-1 over the 3 opinions. 10. Announcements There was an announcement that 2 well-known Open Source projects have expressed an interest in joining the ASF. 11. Adjournment Scheduled to adjourn by 11:30 PST -0800. Adjourned at 11:39. ============ ATTACHMENTS: ============ ----------------------------------------- Attachment A: Status report for the Apache APR Project NO SUBMITTED REPORT ----------------------------------------- Attachment B: Status report for the Apache Excalibur Project * no new committers. * no new PMC members. * no releases. * there has been some interaction with the Apache Jakarta Turbine project, users of avalon-framework, with the prospective of more co-operation happening in the future. * work has been started on "fortress-platform", an effort to make it easier to use our Fortress container. * most other activity has been maintainance work and bugfixing. ----------------------------------------- Attachment C: Status report for the Apache Gump Project Brutus: * access to brutus has been granted to Brett Porter * access to brutus has also been granted to David Crossley, Reinhard Poetz and Dave Brondsema to use brutus for Forrest * we are rather low on disk space. This is no emergency situation yet, we are dealing with it, so no action is required. If we want to expand the variations of Gump builds to more VMs, this will become a problem, though. * we've received a few requests for nightly builds on Brutus but not acted on it so far. One reason is the disk space problem, another that we consider Brutus "insecure as hell" (to quote Leo). Since Gump downloads and runs scripts from all over the world it could potentially taint the nightly build system as well, even if we are doing our best to prevent this (they don't share anything but the JDK installation). Technical: * We are happily building C based projects using configure/make by now. On our roster are APR, HTTPD and Log4CXX so far. * There is slow progress on a Gump redesign that aims at making Gump less monolithic and using Python like Python instead of Java. Other: * no PMC changes, still all Apache committers have access to metadata in CVS, no releases ----------------------------------------- Attachment D: Status report for the Infrastructure Team The Infrastructure Team has gathered for an Infra-thon from March 18th (Fri) til March 22nd (Tue). A travel/lodging budget of roughly $3500 was spent. The final number is not available at this time. All machines based at Mission St. have been move to Paul, the new location of the UnitedLayer colo. Three passes have been requested for physical entry to the colo, for: Brian Behlendorf, Scott Sanders and Sander Temme. Some issues have arrised during the infrathon, but none have cause severe downtime or unacceptable discomfort to our projects. Due to an error on part of the team we have now rougly figured out how much bandwidth we would use without the use of mirrors; rougly 70Mbps. The power distributors bought as approved by the board have not been used. It turned out that we can actually use the 0U PDU that we already have, and, there is room for a second one. We'll have to return the unused PDUs; Mirapath is working on a quote for a new 0U PDU. We are planning on moving all shell accounts to elsewhere at some point. This will be hosted under people.apache.org. DNS has already been updated, meaning our committers have to use people.apache.org to log into their shell. Also, we managed to get hermes (our primary mailserver) failing every 7-8 hours. This problem seems to have disappeared after a BIOS update and/or a kernel update. Brutus, the current Gump machine, can remain under supervision of the Gump PMC until we are done setting up the new Sun server, helios, and loki, our machine purposed for running VMWare. After that, brutus will most likely become our secondary mailserver. The plan was will be shipped to The Netherlands, where it can do its work, and serve as a fail-over in case of failure of hermes. However, due to external conditions that are applicable to the IBM machines we cannot ship any of them out of the US at this point. Minotaur, our machine usually serving our websites, subversion and shell accounts was relieved of serving the websites prior to the colo move. We've left this to be the case because we wish to upgrade the OS on that machine in the near future. We are synchronizing content to ajax every 4 hours. We were planning to upgrade minotaur to FreeBSD 5.3. Unfortunately there were some setbacks that prevented us from doing a backup. We weren't feeling very lucky, and have decided to put off the upgrade til a later point in time. Ajax, our european hosted machine, is currently hosting most of the websites (with the exception of tcl and perl), as well as the wiki, jira and bugzilla. We've switched off the indexing by search engines for the wiki and the issue trackers since the load on the machine was insanely high. Ajax too is scheduled for an OS upgrade, due to the fact that is is stuck in IO wait half the time. We will however not be doing this while most of our infrastructure is hosted by that machine. It has held up pretty nicely, even when we at some point were not using the mirrors and it was handling most of our traffic (we peaked at 50Mbps). Loki is going to be our machine hosting VMWare. We've added 2GB of memory and 2 36GB disks from one of the other machines, giving it enough beef to actually run the ESX installation. It's primary purpose is going to be to host various OS instances for Gump to run on. Helios is our new Sun v40z. It came with a 1TB StorEdge RAID array. Unfortunately it was delivered without an OS installed, no install media, and, the FibreChannel card to connect the StorEdge to the machine was missing. This will all be resolved, but for now we are not able to swiftly put this box into production. However, when put in production this machine will host several different so called zones. One of these zones will be people.apache.org, which will host all current shell accounts. Every PMC will most likely also get their own zone, which it can use as a testing ground/showcase for their own software. Finally Gump will be given one or two zones for their runs. Eris, our final machine, is stripped down to just the chassis pending hardware to refit it. The wiki has seen an upgrade, which was quite an undertaking. Preparation was done for the Bugzilla upgrade. The final upgrade will be done at a later stage. Work is progressing on the Eyebrowse to mod_mbox migration, preserving the Eyebrowse urls. Subversion is doing fairly well. We've seen a number of repository wedges, which seems to have nothing to do with the core functionality of Subversion, but rather has to do with the add-on functionality provided by ViewCVS. We are aiming to cure the symptoms, since we have not been able to pinpoint the cause, by moving our Subversion backend from fs_bdb to fsfs. All in all the infrathon has proven to be a valuable experiment. For the future I personally would consider limiting infrathons to software work only, defering all work involving hardware to the locals. The high bandwidth communication as well as the near to full time availability of the entire team has proven to be incredibly useful. That said, the focus for our services will have to shift at some point to integration and coupling as currently we are growing more and more islands that in consequence require a relatively large support team. Reducing complexity for our users as well as the Infrastructure team is definitely something to consider. ----------------------------------------- Attachment E: Status report for the Apache Jakarta Project 1.1. January - March 2005 1.1.1. Status The last quarter is most notable for the Lucene promotion to TLP and the promotion of JCS from within the Turbine subproject to its own subproject status. Lucene is cleanly separated now while the only infrastructure tie left between Turbine and JCS will be handled when JCS migrates to Subversion. On the promotion subject, HttpClient is still pending promotion to subproject status and Slide is still planning on applying to be a TLP. The Jakarta site saw a lot of cleaning and revamping. It now mimics the www.apache.org 3 column style and has had much in the way of superfluous content removed. The download/mirror pages have been redesigned to increase usability for both subprojects and users. This includes these board reports being available online at http://jakarta.apache.org/site/pmc/board-reports.html. Release-wise, continued Tomcat and Commons releases were joined by new alpha releases from the Tapestry and Hivemind communities. Various legal-discussions have been spawned by Jakarta this quarter. Apache's lack of oversight over unofficial translation sites, questions over how to handle the ASF licence with javadoc pages and usage of government public domain software. All are still not fully resolved at this stage. Very recently there have been more branding issues with JBoss and Tomcat due to an SD Magazine press release. Lastly, JetBrains have agreed to provide licences to their IDE, "Intellij IDEA", on an Apache-wide committer basis and not per subproject/codebase. 1.1.1.1. Possible plans for the next quarter * HttpClient to subproject level. * Taglibs, ECS, BSF, JCS, Cactus SVN migrations. * Improved Jakarta level javadoc indexing. 1.1.2. Releases 1.1.2.1. March * 9 March 2005 - JCS moves to Jakarta Subproject * 6 March 2005 - Commons Logging 1.0.5 Alpha1 Released 1.1.2.2. February * 24 February 2005 - HiveMind 1.1-alpha-2 Released * 22 February 2005 - Tapestry 3.1-alpha-1 Released * 20 February 2005 - Tomcat 5.5.8-alpha Released * 15 February 2005 - Tapestry 3.0.2 Released * 14 February 2005 - Lucene moves to TLP * 06 February 2005 - Commons HttpClient 3.0 RC1 Released 1.1.2.3. January * 30 January 2005 - Tomcat 5.5.7 Voted Stable * 28 January 2005 - Cactus 1.7 Released * 20 January 2005 - Tomcat 5.5.7-alpha Released * 19 January 2005 - HiveMind 1.1-alpha-1 Released 1.1.2.4. December * 15 December 2004 - Commons Transaction 1.0 Released * 15 December 2004 - Commons-Net 1.3.0 Released * 12 December 2004 - Tomcat 5.5.6-alpha Released 1.1.3. Community changes 1.1.3.1. New Committers * 3 December 2004 - Warwick Burrows (wburrows) - Slide * 5 December 2004 - Siegfried Goeschl (sgoeschl) - Turbine * 18 December 2004 - Thomas Draier (draier) - Slide * 3 January 2005 - William Glass-Husain (wglass) - Velocity * 3 January 2005 - Kazuhito Suguri (suguri) - Cactus * 20 January 2005 - Carlos Villegas (cvillegas) - Slide * 9 February 2005 - David Brosius (dbrosius) - BCEL * 10 March 2005 - Dhiru Pandey (dhirup) - Taglibs * 10 March 2005 - Martijn Blankestijn (mblankestijn) - JMeter * 14 March 2005 - Jim Jagielski and William Rowe Jr both joining Tomcat/mod_jk. * 15 March 2005 - Magnus Grimsell has been voted in and is currently submitting his CLA - Cactus 1.1.4. Infrastructure news Jakarta has replaced most of the nagoya references. While there are still a few (250 to 300) it's a good improvement on the 1300 or so there were at first and many of the references remaining are in the less active areas (both committer and user). BCEL, Commons, Regexp and the Jakarta website have all migrated from CVS to SVN, joining ORO and Velocity. This represents about a third of Jakarta. Another third are slowly on their way, while the last third would rather stay with CVS such a time as announcements are made to curtail CVS usage. 1.1.5. Subproject news (based on projects that have had a notable event, ie) release, change of location within Jakarta) 1.1.5.1. Commons HttpClient Commons HttpClient has had its first 3.0 release candidate and a final release should happen shortly. Much work has also been put into planning for Jakarta HttpClient (HttpClient 4.0), and initial development has begun. The focus of Jakarta HttpClient will be on making HttpClient more compact, modular, and reusable. We are currently putting together use cases to help guide the 4.0 development. 1.1.5.2. Commons Logging Alpha release containing improved memory recycling during hot deployment in containers without explicit support for JCL. Pushing towards a full 1.0.5 release. 1.1.5.3. Commons Net Commons Net 1.3.0 was released in late December. This release contained a large number of enhancements and bug fixes, but the most important change was the addition of NTP/SNTP support. Since 1.3.0, there have been more enhancements to the FTP parser (currently in CVS), with the ultimate aim of making the FTP client configuration much more flexible and consequently being able to support different locales seamlessly. This, plus other bug fixes currently in the works, will form the basis of the 1.4 release. 1.1.5.4. Commons Transaction 1.0 final has been released in December. 1.1 already is feature complete and in beta status. It mainly adds deadlock detection and a partially revised interface layout. Slide 2.2 and OJB 1.1 are likely to use it. 1.1.5.5. Cactus Cactus 1.7 has been released preparing the way for a big refactoring. We are indeed going to refactor Cactus to leverage Cargo (http://cargo.codehaus.org). Nicolas Chalumeau (contributor) and Vincent Massol have been working on this. That should lighten Cactus and allow supporting many more containers and features (like hot deploy, etc) which our users have been asking for a while. Two new committers have been voted in recently (Kazuhito and Magnus). EJB Cactification has been added recently by Magnus and he's busy adding new improvements to it. Felipe is continuing with improvements to the Maven plugin for Cactus. 1.1.5.6. JCS JCS has been adjusting to to its recent move to a site level project and is working on its first formal release. There are no known open issues. 1.1.5.7. HiveMind Many new features have been recently added to HiveMind, driven by the needs of Tapestry primarily; this includes the ability to switch the locale on the fly (on a per-thread basis). This is used when accessing per-module message catalogs. In addition, HiveMind may now make ordinary POJOs into services (without a specific interface). The XML descriptors have been simplified, as a package for the module may now be specified, allowing the many class names in a descriptor to be abbreviated. Discussions are in place now about limiting the scope of 1.1 so that we can progress to a beta and final release. 1.1.5.8. Tapestry An early alpha release of Tapestry 3.1 has been released. Tapestry 3.0.2 may not be the final bug fix release for 3.0; there are discussions about fixing a few more bugs and integrating Paul Ferraro's "friendly URLs" patch into the code base for 3.0.3. Refactorings continue in the 3.1 code base, in pursuit of JSR-168 Portlet support. 1.1.5.9. Tomcat This has been a quiet period for Tomcat, partially because I've been extremely busy at school ;) We released versions 5.5.7 (stable) and 5.5.8 (alpha for now), each of which was a maintenance release addressing a good number of bugs and user requests. Version 5.5.9 should be out within the next couple of weeks, also addressing a number of recently reported issued (none serious). Two noteworthy items: first, adoption of Tomcat 5.5 has really accelerated following the first couple of stable releases. Many users are reporting satisfaction with the increased performance and stability. And second, we have kept in touch with the Geronimo project, especially with Jacek Laskowski (sp probably), working towards seamless Geronimo/Tomcat integration. ----------------------------------------- Attachment F: Status report for the Apache Lucene Project NO SUBMITTED REPORT ----------------------------------------- Attachment G: Status report for the Apache Portals Project Executive Summary Business as usual, some infrastructure bottlenecks, as setting up Subversion repos require apmail and planning for movement of mail lists. The only things that requires Board attention is the potentially encumbering patents declared by Oasis for WSRP4J. Standing Issues * In the context of the Oasis IP policy brought up by dims, we found that WSRP4J is significantly affected by a patent from WebCollage and several from IBM. IBM grants royalty-free licenses for patents affecting the standard implementation, but the situation WRT TBD is not clear, as well as the scope of the patent. We are aware that negotiations with Oasis are ongoing, and want to be in the loop, both to provide any needed information and to clear uncertainties on the standard. http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/wsrp/ipr.php * We are seeing little cross-pollination between the different projects, as pluto and WSRP4J are highly specialized infrastructure projects, devoted to implementation of standards, while Jetspeed and the portlet application samples are much higher in the software stack. This attracts different kind of developers at each project. This is not bad per se, but asks for higher cross-pollination between the different groups. Common involvement in infrastructure tasks will probably be key to achieving better cohesion in the community. Community changes * Craig Doremus as new committer in pluto * Diego Louzán as new committer in WSRP4J * Randall Watler as new committer in Jetspeed * Ate Douma and Nick Lothian were elected for the Apache Portals PMC Releases * Jetspeed-2.0-M1 (Dec, 2004) * Jetspeed-1.6RC1 with preliminary JSR-168 support * Pluto 1.0.1-RC2 (Dec 21, 2004) with bugfixes on the initial import Technical events * Jetspeed-1.6-dev dropped support of tomcat-4. Dropping needed for compatibility with new JSR-168 portlets. Pluto had done the same time ago, as the way portlet applications are deployed requires very specific session sharing semantics * Raphael has moved experimentally jetspeed documentation to Forrest format, which he became familiar with through Grafitto. Most of the community is interested, and it could help us to attain better user support. Infrastructure news There remain several lists in jakarta (jetspeed-dev and jetspeed-user). This and the fact that subversion was having intermittent problems refrained us from the move to subversion. It is in process now, I think we could manage it with a small push with some help from apmail people to move the lists. The plan is at http://wiki.apache.org/portals/JetspeedMigration , and cvs2svn has been tested on the repository. Raphael Luta is the main entry point for this effort. It would be useful if one of the four ASF members in the PMC could get proficient and into apmail (privacywise simpler) ----------------------------------------- Attachment H: Status report for the Apache SpamAssassin Project Support needed: * I need some legal help from some quarter to finish the Yahoo! patent DomainKeys license review, but I had some help from Larry Rosen, so I might just wing it at this point. * There's an open question about whether we can implement our own distributed checksum system to detect bulk email in the face of the Commtouch patent (or if we can somehow get the patent invalidated). Highlights of Events from December to now: * SpamAssassin 3.0.2 was released on December 16. * In February, receiving twice as many votes as the closest contender, we took top honors in the Anti-Spam category of Datamation's Product of the Year: http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/secu/article.php/3481971 * We are steady at 6 PMC members from a pool of 9 active committers. We added a new committer, Daryl C. W. O'Shea, but increased from 2 to 3 inactive committers. * We added a new "blogspam" list (instead of creating a subproject). Some discussion has ensued, but anti-blogspam development outside of the list seems stronger than on the list. * We lost some core functionality due to a broad patent. The Commtouch patent on bulk email detection (and their usage of it) caused DCC to no longer be open source. * Reasonable progess on finishing the ASF infrastructure integration. * SpamAssassin 3.1 real soon now. It will have lots of good stuff. ----------------------------------------- Attachment I: Status report for the Apache Web Services Project Noteable Happenings - Axis2 developers will meet for their second face to face meeting at Colombo (Sri Lanka) on 29th,30th,31st of March. - JOnAS certified J2EE 1.4 with Axis. The JOnAS team has privatised axis 1.2 RC2 to make changes and has contributed back modifications. - Apollo successfully participated in the OASIS WSRF Interop. The team has taken on new committers. - Muse team is currently implementing the necessary services for the upcoming WSDM Interop. This marks the project's movement towards WSDM 1.0. An Alpha release is slated for AFTER the WSDM Interop. - Hermes team has taken on new committers. The Hermes name is up for review, please see legal issues below. An Alpha release of Hermes is slated for AFTER the WSDM Interop. Code Releases - First milestone release of the Apache Axis2 is announced. The developers expects the release will lead to important feedback from the developer community, and the interactions will eventually yield a better architecture for the next generation SOAP engine. - Axis 1.2 RC3 released. Pass Standalone TCK tests (JAX-RPC + SAAJ), still working with JOnAS team to pass J2EE TCK (switching to Axis CVS instead of private version). - jUDDI 0.9 RC4 will be released immediately following the release of Axis 1.2 Final. jUDDI 0.9 Final will be released approximately 2-3 weeks later. - Muse Alpha V0.5 was released on February 10, 2005. - Apollo Alpha V2.0 was released in early March 2005. Legal Issues - Apollo, Muse and Hermes (?..name will change) trademark issues are being reviewed. Currently we've heard that Apollo and Muse are fine, the Hermes dev-list voted on new names and the list is currently under legal review by HP folks. ----------------------------------------- Attachment J: Status report for the Apache XMLBeans Project NO SUBMITTED REPORT ------------------------------------------------------ End of minutes for the March 30, 2005 board meeting.