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This was extracted (@ 2024-03-20 23:10) from a list of minutes which have been approved by the Board.
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PLC4X

20 Mar 2024 [Christofer Dutz]

Report was filed, but display is awaiting the approval of the Board minutes.

20 Dec 2023 [Christofer Dutz]

## Description:
The mission of the Apache PLC4X project is creating a set of libraries for
communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a
variety of protocols but with a shared API.

## Project Status:
Current project status: ongoing with moderate activity
Issues for the board: none

## Membership Data:
Apache PLC4X was founded 2019-04-17 (5 years ago)
There are currently 21 committers and 13 PMC members in this project.
The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 3:2.

Community changes, past quarter:
- No new PMC members. Last addition was César García on 2021-10-01.
- No new committers. Last addition was Jinlin Hong on 2022-11-02.

## Project Activity:
The most noteworthy points for the last 3 months were definitely:
- Our last release after exactly one year (didn't copy+paste that)
- Work on the Profinet Driver
- Initiation of a new Web-Based UI tool
- Major updates in the S7 driver (datatype-handling)
- Major updates in the handling of secure OPC-UA connections
- Work on PLC4PY which now has a first working Modbus driver
- Refactored the way transports are configured
- Prepared the build for reproducible builds
- Multiple Bugfixes

Recent releases:
0.11.0 was released on 2023-10-06.
0.10.0 was released on 2022-10-06.
0.9.1 was released on 2021-09-21.

## Community Health:
While I was a bit worried about activity inside the project in my last
reports, things are looking a bit different now. There's currently plenty
activity on various initiatives.

Following the last release we received a number of new bug-reports and fixes
by new folks. We're definitely not going to wait another year for a new
release.

20 Sep 2023 [Christofer Dutz]

## Description:
The mission of the Apache PLC4X project is creating a set of libraries for
communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a
variety of protocols but with a shared API.

## Project Status:
Current project status: Ongoing with slightly less than usual activity
Issues for the board: None

## Membership Data:
Apache PLC4X was founded 2019-04-17 (4 years ago) There are currently 21
committers and 13 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is
roughly 3:2.

Community changes, past quarter:
- No new PMC members. Last addition was César García on 2021-10-01.
- No new committers. Last addition was Jinlin Hong on 2022-11-02.

## Project Activity:
The project has mostly been working on scratching individual contributor's
itches, implementing features needed for their every day work.
- New IEC 60870-5-104 java driver
- New UPC-UA go driver
- Continued work on the Go C-Bus Driver

In general the project is aiming for a new release, as the time since our last
release has been way too long.

## Community Health:
It's been a pretty slow quarter, the expected boost of activity after one of
the PMC members switching jobs didn't quite come as expected, but we're still
hopefully it will come.

The project knows that we need to grow the contributor base, however we need
to put in a lot more effort into this. Admittedly PLCs and writing drivers for
communicating with them is probably not the sexiest of things to do.

We've started planning a hackathon, which we are hopefully going to run this
December, there the existing and possibly future community would be able to
re-unite and hopefully re-spark the activity levels a bit.

21 Jun 2023 [Christofer Dutz]

## Description:
The mission of the Apache PLC4X project is creating a set of libraries for
communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a
variety of protocols but with a shared API.

## Project Status:
Current project status: ongoing with moderate activity
Issues for the board: none

## Membership Data:
Apache PLC4X was founded 2019-04-17 (4 years ago)
There are currently 21 committers and 13 PMC members in this project.
The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 3:2.

Community changes, past quarter:
- No new PMC members. Last addition was César García on 2021-10-01.
- No new committers. Last addition was Jinlin Hong on 2022-11-02.

Even if we managed to attract some new folks after switching to GitHub
Issues, PRs and Discussions, still we haven't identified anyone to invite as
committer or promote to PMC membership. But we know that it would be good
for the project and we're keeping an eye on potential candidates.

And regarding diversity of the PMC and committership, nothing has changed
and from the active members of our community not more than one person works
for the same company.

## Project Activity:
There have been multiple initiatives from the community. Probably the most note-
worthy would be an updated S7 driver able to do cyclic communication. A new
Apache Hop integration and updates to the EtherNet/IP driver. Currently there
is one ongoing initiative to bring the Profinet driver forward.

Unfortunately, some of these have brought the project in a somewhat unstable
state and we'll be investing quite some time to re-stabilize this in the
next few months.

In PLC4Go a lot of work has been put into streamlining the API, SPI and the
C-Bus driver, fixing issues with edge cases and fixing several bugs. Test
got extended greatly which lead now to a coverage above 80% in the above
mentioned components.

We are also planning on investing some time to refactor some of the core
mechanisms to handle multi-connection drivers.

## Community Health:
Commit-activity has increased by 34% in the last quarter and we have 15
individual contributors on file. Communication has decreased by 18%, but
is still at levels we would still call ok (540 vs 653). This quarter we
added Github Discussions as new communication channel and are starting to
use it.

22 Mar 2023 [Christofer Dutz]

## Description:
The mission of the Apache PLC4X project is creating a set of libraries for
communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a
variety of protocols but with a shared API.

## Issues:
There are no issues requiring board attention.

## Membership Data:
Apache PLC4X was founded 2019-04-17 (4 years ago) There are currently 21
committers and 13 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is
roughly 3:2.

Community changes, past quarter:
- No new PMC members. Last addition was César García on 2021-10-01.
- No new committers. Last addition was Jinlin Hong on 2022-11-02.

Diversity wise, we still don't have even two of the active PMC members working
for the same company.

## Project Activity:
The community has been chipping away with various initiatives. We are
receiving a constant stream of smaller issues via GitHub. After fixing a few
of these, we are expecting to be releasing a new version of PLC4X pretty soon.

## Community Health:
The community is generally active, however not as active as it used to be.
Email activity has dropped quite a bit. Commit activity has dropped too, but
this is probably mostly related to the fact that one of our main committers
currently not able to contribute at the same level, but this is probably going
to be resolved pretty soon.

In order to address the slowdown of the community, we are planning on doing a
community meetup near Frankfurt within the next quarter. Hopefully this will
spark the sense of community a bit more again.

21 Dec 2022 [Christofer Dutz]

## Description:
The mission of the Apache PLC4X project is creating a set of libraries for
communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a
variety of protocols but with a shared API.

## Issues:
There are currently no issues requiring board attention.

## Membership Data:
Apache PLC4X was founded 2019-04-17 (4 years ago) There are currently 21
committers and 13 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is
roughly 3:2.

Community changes, past quarter:
- No new PMC members. Last addition was César García on 2021-10-01.
- Jinlin Hong was added as committer on 2022-11-02

Form the currently most active contributors there are not even two working at
the same company, so we are currently not considering any dominant influence
of any single business entity on the project.

## Project Activity:
We finished our work on some of the refactoring and streamlining of our APIs
and are now sort of going back to a normal more of activity. Also are we
seeing a broad set of initiatives currently being worked on:
- Profinet Drivers
- Major update of the ADS driver
- The PLC4Rust and PLC4Py initiatives are continuing
- We're doing some onboarding work for some of the new contributors that
 showed up over the last few months.

We did notice that our usage of JavaFX in one of our new tools (only
contained in the 0.10.0 and still in Beta state there) is actually not ok
since JavaFX was removed from the JDK itself. We'll be replacing this with a
technology which is compatible with the ASF rules as soon as possible or we'll
be removing it if there is no short-term solution for this problem.

Recent releases:
- 0.10.0 was released on 2022-10-06
- 0.9.1 was released on 2021-12-17

## Community Health:
Since we switched from Jira to GitHub Issues, we are seeing a significant
uptake on activity coming in from new folks. The project is doing its best to
encourage them to submit pull requests and mentoring them to be able to do so.
At least 3 new contributors have shown up in the last few months.

In parallel, we have started an initiative together with some friends from the
IoTDB project, to do some initial kick-off work for building an open-source
and, hopefully soon Apache-based, Historian solution, which would less be a tool
or framework, but more a product intended for the automation industry. Hoping
on some increased interest and activity based on that.

So far, we're happy how the project is evolving, and we hope to be able to
invite more people into comittership soon.

21 Sep 2022 [Christofer Dutz]

## Description:
The mission of the Apache PLC4X project is creating a set of libraries for
communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a
variety of protocols but with a shared API.

## Issues:
There are currently no issues requiring board attention

## Membership Data:
Apache PLC4X was founded 2019-04-17 (3 years ago)
There are currently 20 committers and 13 PMC members in this project.
The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 5:4.

Community changes, past quarter:
- No new PMC members. Last addition was César García on 2021-10-01.
- Iñigo Angulo Otegi was added as committer on 2022-08-29

## Project Activity:

It's been an interesting quarter. The project has seen numerous different
initiatives. Our BACNet driver has gotten a lot of attention, same with a new
C-Bus driver. Our Beckhoff ADS driver has received a major overhaul. Work on
some drivers (Especially PROFINET) has been taken over by other members of the
community. A lot of progress has been made on the Browse and Discovery API.
Besides that the community has been working on PLC4PY (PLC4X on Python),
PLC4RS (PLC4X on Rust). Also has PLC4Go recently received a text-based GUI
application allowing to use the PLC4Go API from the commandline and something
similar has been added to PLC4J as a JavaFX-based GUI application.

We haven't had any releases in the last quarter.

Our last releases were:
0.8.0 was released on 2021-01-28.
0.7.0 was released on 2020-05-25.
0.6.0 was released on 2020-03-01.

However, we're currently tying up the last strings in preparation for our next
release of version 0.10.0. Also will there be multiple presentations on PLC4X
at the upcoming ApacheCon NA in New Orleans.

## Community Health:
Communication-wise, it's been a pretty quiet quarter. I credit this to the
fact that most people actively working on some of the features are working on
them on their own, only syncing up every now and then. Nothing to be really
concerned about. Looking at most of the metrics, most of them have increases
from 70%-136% while the only decrease is on the dev@ and issues@ mailing lists

15 Jun 2022 [Christofer Dutz]

## Description:
The mission of the Apache PLC4X project is creating a set of libraries for
communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a
variety of protocols but with a shared API.

## Issues:
Nothing to report right now. The problems about the lack of community activity
seem to have been significantly reduced as activity has picked up quite a bit.

## Membership Data:
Apache PLC4X was founded 2019-04-17 (3 years ago)
There are currently 19 committers and 13 PMC members in this project.
The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 5:4.

Community changes, past quarter:
- No new PMC members. Last addition was César García on 2021-10-01.
- No new committers. Last addition was Thomas Frost on 2021-05-07.

## Project Activity:
In the past 3 months the project has been waking up after it's slumber. Some
members of the community have been working on PLC4PY and just recently another
initiative has been workinng on brinigng PLC4X to Rust (PLC4RS). The rest has
been continuously addressing reported bugs and issues and have continuously
been working on improving things throughout the project.

Last Releases:
- 0.9.1 (Released on 2021-12-17)
- 0.9.0 (Released on 2021-09-21)

## Community Health:
Most interaction regarding Bugs and PRs is being handled via GitHub. Also most
of the initiatives seem to be working mostly silently or usig slack for
coordination. So I'm not worried about the drop of 38% in mailinglist
communication.

14 code contributors in the past quarter (no change) 44 PRs opened on GitHub,
past quarter (-4% change) 43 PRs closed on GitHub, past quarter (-2% change)

16 Mar 2022 [Christofer Dutz / Roy]

## Description:
The mission of the Apache PLC4X project is creating a set of libraries for
communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a
variety of protocols but with a shared API.

## Issues:
There are currently no issues requiring board attention. The previously
reported absence of PMC activity seems to have disappeared. I am no longer
concerned about this.

## Membership Data:
Apache PLC4X was founded 2019-04-17 (3 years ago)
There are currently 19 committers and 13 PMC members in this project.
The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 5:4.

Community changes, past quarter:
- No new PMC members. Last addition was César García on 2021-10-01.
- No new committers. Last addition was Thomas Frost on 2021-05-07.

## Project Activity:
The project has continuously been working on adding new features, fixing bugs,
and improving existing code. Probably the most significant block of work has
been the complete re-write of our code-generation core. In anticipation of
more programming-languages coming to the project, we refactored and rewrote
most of the code-generation to make it simpler to develop new code-generation
templates. In the end all of this didn't change a single driver, but the
overall usability of our tooling has improved as well as we lowered the
entry-bar for folks coming into the project.

We did a bugfix release 0.9.1 addressing one reported CVE and adding specail
measures preventing any log4j related issues.

Recent releases:
0.9.1 was released on 2021-12-17.
0.9.0 was released on 2021-09-21.

## Community Health:
Project activity was low in December. In the beginning of January, I (Chris)
posted a blog post [1], where I announced that I personally would be stopping
to provide free community support for companies. This blogpost unexpectedly
went viral. Online and offline news picked it up all over the world and
reported about it in the context of the whole "sustainability of open-source"
discussion. I did see one occasion where false news was spread (HackerNews
reported Apache PLC4X was giving up free community support), but I think I
managed to correct that. Besides that, it generally brought a lot of attention
to the topic of open-source sustainability, but also to our project. Since
then, we have seen a significant increase in page views to our website, to the
github repository and we even got several new contributors sending
pull-requests, bug reports, etc. There are also several companies willing to
invest in PLC4X development. Admittedly now, I am really happy with the
activity in the project.

45 PRs opened on GitHub, past quarter (87% increase) 43 PRs closed on GitHub,
past quarter (72% increase) Not sure why the number of contributors is shown
the same it definitely did increase quite a bit.

My general takeaway is, that it looks as if me stepping back a bit might even
have been good for the project. I am not giving up on the project, I just
switched to not instantly fix everything and rather help people reporting bugs
into fixing them themselves and contributing this back.

Perhaps projects in which one or a few individuals are excessively trying to
keep all balls in flight is counter-productive with respect to developing a
healthy community.

[1] https://github.com/chrisdutz/blog/blob/main/plc4x/free-trial-expired.adoc

15 Dec 2021 [Christofer Dutz / Roy]

## Description:
The mission of the Apache PLC4X project is creating a set of libraries for
communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a
variety of protocols but with a shared API.

## Issues:
There are currently no issues requiring board attention. I do see a bit of an
absence of PMC coverage however regarding things cominig up on the
mailinglists (dev and private)

## Membership Data:
Apache PLC4X was founded 2019-04-17 (3 years ago)
There are currently 19 committers and 13 PMC members in this project.
The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 5:4.

Community changes, past quarter:
- César García was added to the PMC on 2021-10-01
- No new committers. Last addition was Thomas Frost on 2021-05-07.

## Project Activity:
After finishing the work for the next release some members of the community
have invested a lot of time into a complete refactoring of our codebase for
the code-generation. This was needed in order to be able to support more
situations needed for new drivers, but also for cleaning up stuff to make it
more easily understandable for others. Others have been working on adding very
cool new features to the S7 driver as well as working on the CAN-drivers.

We had talks at 4 conferences:
- ApacheCon @Home (2 Talks)
- LF OSS-Summit (1 Talk)
- Eclipse Con (1 Talk)
- IoT Conference (1 Talk)

## Community Health:
We are getting more and more reports of people using plc4x and getting bug
reports. That's great. However contributions have been coming in from 11% less
individuals compared to the previous quarter. Hopefully, in 2022 we will be
able to do in-person events again, to strengthen the sense of community again.
I am feeling as we are loosing grip of each other after 2 years of absolutely
no in-person events. In the past especially these events have been helping
with building the commnunity.

15 Sep 2021 [Christofer Dutz / Sheng]

## Description:
The mission of the Apache PLC4X project is creating a set of libraries for
communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a
variety of protocols but with a shared API.

## Issues:
There are currently no issues

## Membership Data:
Apache PLC4X was founded 2019-04-17 (2 years ago) There are currently 19
committers and 12 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is
roughly 5:3.

Community changes, past quarter:
- No new PMC members. Last addition was Ben Hutcheson on 2020-11-08.
- No new committers. Last addition was Thomas Frost on 2021-05-07.

## Project Activity:
The community has been working hard on preparing the codebase for the next
release. Many different larger initiatives are finally coming to an end and
are being integrated back into the devleopment branch. Currently two votes on
tooling releases are on their way, which are needed to do the big 0.9.0
release.

It's currently conference-time and we have quite a number of PLC4X related
talks accepted at various conferences:
- ApacheCon Asia (2 Talks)
- ApacheCon @Home (2 Talks) (upcoming)
- LF OSS-Summit (1 Talk) (upcoming)
- Eclipse Con (1 Talk) (upcmming)
- IoT Conference (1 Talk) (upcoming)

Apache PLC4X 0.8.0 was released on 2021-01-28

## Community Health:
After a short phase of summer-holiday related low activity, we're seeing
increased activity in both commits as well as the mailinglists

16 Jun 2021 [Christofer Dutz / Craig]

## Description:
The mission of the Apache PLC4X project is creating a set of libraries for
communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a
variety of protocols but with a shared API.

## Issues:
There are no issues requiring board attention.

## Membership Data:
Apache PLC4X was founded 2019-04-17 (2 years ago)
There are currently 19 committers and 12 PMC members in this project.
The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 5:3.

Community changes, past quarter:
- No new PMC members. Last addition was Ben Hutcheson on 2020-11-08.
- Thomas Frost was added as committer on 2021-05-07

## Project Activity:
The project is currently working hard on finishing a number of new features
and improvements that are currently being worked on in parallel. As soon as
these are brought to an end, we're planning on starting the next release.

## Community Health:
Overall activity hast increased since the last report and more and more folks
seem to be showing up which we are helping in doing their first contributions.
I would consider the overall health of the project very good.

The list activity increased by 35%, number of commits went up by 25%, number
of contributors increased by 15%

17 Mar 2021 [Christofer Dutz / Justin]

## Description:
The mission of the Apache PLC4X project is creating a set of libraries for
communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a
variety of protocols but with a shared API.

## Issues:
There are currently no issues needing board attention.

## Membership Data:
Apache PLC4X was founded 2019-04-17 (2 years ago) There are currently 18
committers and 12 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is
3:2.

Community changes, past quarter:
- No new PMC members. Last addition was Ben Hutcheson on 2020-11-08.
- No new committers. Last addition was Ben Hutcheson on 2020-09-26.

## Project Activity:
In January we finally managed to bring all ongoing work to a state in which we
could finally do a release again. We are planning on releasing way more often
after these intense refactoring has been completed.

We have seen an increase of incoming questions and support-requests on the
mailing list from new sources, which seems to imply a growing usage in public.

The main areas the community has been working on are:
- Rebuilding the Kafka Connect adapter, having that validated and made
 available in the Confluent Hub for easy installation
- Implementing an MSPEC based OPC-UA driver for PLC4X, which will allow us to
 support OPC-UA in other languages (We were currently relying on Eclipse Milo
 for that)
- Creating an API for Discovery and Browsing (Testing this in PLC4Go)
- Implementing Auto-Discovery and Browsing for the KNX protocol

PLC4X has reported to be mentioned in more and more Industrial IoT related
podcasts and videos.

Conference-wise this quarter has been very quiet.

## Community Health:
I think the community is generally in a good shape and continuously growing.

We have continued our monthly community zoom call on every first Wednesday of
the month, which we stated last year, but this is mainly used for community
building and sometimes for answering questions, not for discussing important
project matters.

- dev@plc4x.apache.org had a 13% decrease in traffic in the past quarter (363
 emails compared to 417)
- issues@plc4x.apache.org had a 198% increase in traffic in the past quarter
 (260 emails compared to 87)
- 24 issues opened in JIRA, past quarter (84% increase)
- 40 issues closed in JIRA, past quarter (344% increase)
- 377 commits in the past quarter (-23% decrease)
- 12 code contributors in the past quarter (9% increase)
- 17 PRs opened on GitHub, past quarter (-29% decrease)
- 20 PRs closed on GitHub, past quarter (-23% decrease)
- 305 Stars on GitHub (up by 45)
- 134 Forks on GitHub (up by 12)
- 421 Twitter Followers (up by 28)

16 Dec 2020 [Christofer Dutz / Niclas]

## Description:

The mission of the Apache PLC4X project is creating a set of libraries for
communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a
variety of protocols but with a shared API.

## Issues:

There are no issues requiring board attention.

## Membership Data:

Apache PLC4X was founded 2019-04-17 (2 years ago)
There are currently 18 committers and 12 PMC members in this project.
The Committer-to-PMC ratio is 3:2.

Community changes, past quarter:
- Ben Hutcheson was added to the PMC on 2020-11-08
- Otto Fowler was added to the PMC on 2020-10-23
- Stefano Bossi was added as committer on 2020-09-07
- Ben Hutcheson was added as committer on 2020-09-26

## Project Activity:

The project has invested a lot of time and effort into streamlining the Java
version of our drivers, especially regarding shared datatypes. Also a lot was
invested in testing and fixing issues reported by the community.

While we did see quite some reduced community activity in the last reporting
quarter, this time we can report a lot of initiatives have been worked on by the
community:

- PLC4Py
- PLC4Go
- A new CAN driver
- OPC-UA Server
- Refreshed Kafka Connect adapter
- Updated Connection Pool

A large group of the community is working on porting PLC4X to the language
Python. We have added a first successful port of the KNX and Modbus drivers to
Go and work has just begun porting things to C# and .Net.

Promotion-Wise we have also tried to take advantage of what virtual meetups
allow us and have participated in a number of virtual conferences and
webinars. Some of us have reached out to some of the biggest IoT meetups and
asked them if there was interest in a PLC4X talk.

- ApacheCon@Home 2020 (4 Talks about or partly about PLC4X)
- LIBRECON
- HiveMQ Webinar

For December he have planned the following

- "100 Orte virtuell erleben! beim FZI"
- Eclipse IoT Meetup
- Eclipse IoT Working Group presentation

Right now we're working hard on finishing some last work and are hoping to
initiate the release of version 0.8.0 within the next week or so.

## Community Health:

Right now we are very happy with the state of the community.

In order to help with onboarding and keeping the community engaged, we started
monthly community-calls via Zoom. Where we don't have an agenda, but can do
some hands-on help and mentoring and sort of hang our together.

- dev@plc4x.apache.org had a 17% decrease in traffic in the past quarter
 (424 emails compared to 505)
- issues@plc4x.apache.org had a 49% decrease in traffic in the past quarter
 (115 emails compared to 222)
- 13 issues opened in JIRA, past quarter (-67% decrease)
- 9 issues closed in JIRA, past quarter (-66% decrease)
- 466 commits in the past quarter (63% increase)
- 9 code contributors in the past quarter (-30% decrease)
- 23 PRs opened on GitHub, past quarter (4% increase)
- 25 PRs closed on GitHub, past quarter (56% increase)
- 260 Stars on GitHub (up by 35)
- 122 Forks on GitHub (must have missed this number last time :-/)
- 393 Twitter Followers (up by 20)

The decrease of email communication shouldn't worry us, as most gossip and
chatter has moved to our slack channel. If important things are discussed
there, we usually write up a summary and post that to the list.

16 Sep 2020 [Christofer Dutz / Sam]

## Description:

The mission of the Apache PLC4X project is creating a set of libraries for
communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a
variety of protocols but with a shared API.

## Issues:

None

## Membership Data:

Apache PLC4X was founded 2019-04-17 (a year ago) There are currently 16
committers and 10 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is
8:5.

Community changes, past quarter:
- No new PMC members. Last addition was Lukas Ott on 2020-03-17.
- Stefano Bossi was invited as new Committer on 2020-09-04.

## Project Activity:

Version 0.7.0 was released on 2020-05-25 and we are working hard on making the
0.8.0 ready for release. In the past few weeks we did quite a number of bug
reports and feature requests which have mostly been addressed.

Also in the last few weeks a lot of new folks have been showing up, one was
already invited to become a committer and some which will probably be invited
pretty to join the community soon, if they continue the current level of
activity.

Especially the new PLC4PY initiative, where a group of community members and
new folks have started working on porting PLC4J to Python is currently seeding
more activity in the community.

Another notable initiative is one to bring support for CAN bus communication
as well also the efforts to port PLC4J to C.

ApacheCon@Home will be having 3 talks where PLC4X is a main topic or a
sub-topic and we are looking forward to it.

## Community Health:

- dev@plc4x.apache.org had a 11% decrease in traffic in the past quarter
 (554 emails compared to 619)
- issues@plc4x.apache.org had a 71% increase in traffic in the past quarter
 (250 emails compared to 146)
- 39 issues opened in JIRA, past quarter (129% increase)
- 26 issues closed in JIRA, past quarter (85% increase)
- 273 commits in the past quarter (-20% decrease)
- 13 code contributors in the past quarter (-7% decrease)
- 21 PRs opened on GitHub, past quarter (-38% decrease)
- 16 PRs closed on GitHub, past quarter (-52% decrease)
- 225 Github Stars (up by 24)
- 373 @ApachePLC4X Twitter account followers (up by 18)

17 Jun 2020 [Christofer Dutz / Justin]

## Description:

The mission of the Apache PLC4X project is creating a set of libraries for
communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a
variety of protocols but with a shared API.

## Issues:

None

## Membership Data:

Apache PLC4X was founded 2019-04-17 (a year ago)
There are currently 16 committers and 10 PMC members in this project.
The Committer-to-PMC ratio is 8:5.

Community changes, past quarter:
- Lukas Ott was added to the PMC on 2020-03-17
- Etienne Robinet was added as committer on 2020-03-28
- Otto Fowler was added as committer on 2020-04-30

## Project Activity:

- 0.7.0 was released on 2020-05-25

This quarter was pretty much dominated by us porting the last drivers to
the new generated drivers system. Also were we working hard on preparing
things for the 0.7.0 release which was our first release of the new
generation of drivers.

Also did Chris start on his EU research funded project on porting PLC4X to
the C language with a final goal of running PLC4X drivers on Apache
MyNewt.

This new initiative brought to the table a number of new contributors.
Otto who was invited to join the project was one of these.

In general the number of conference talks dropped to 0 in this period due
to COVID-19, but quite a number of online meetups have been talked about:

- "Hands On": Reading Siemens S7 with PLC4X" was in German on 2020-04-01,
  and english was 2020-04-09
- (Industrial) IoT with Open Source - an Overview on "Monthly Industry
  4.0 and IoT Meetup Stuttgart" was 2020-04-21
- IoTSydney: 2020-04-30

We’re continuing to make good progress on most topics.

As it is one of the projects major barriers, that we usually aren’t
allowed to officially mention which companies are using PLC4X, we decided
to add a page of “adopters” to our website, where companies can get
themselves listed. We decided that the process should generally work via
GitHub pull requests as this way we would have the responsibility on file.

 https://plc4x.apache.org/users/adopters.html

So far we haven’t had any requests to adding other companies.

## Community Health:

The community is in great shape and due to the increased diversity of the
codebase we have seen new folks join in on discussions or even joining the
project. We are hopeful that this trend will continue.

It also seems that in the past few weeks the inter-project cooperation has
increased. Here I’d especially like to point out the Apache StreamPipes
and the Apache IoTDB project.

Stats may be different, as at the time of creating the report the report
tool wasn't working so I had to compile them myself

- dev@plc4x.apache.org had a 56% increase in traffic in the past quarter
  (655 emails compared to 419)
- 15 issues opened in JIRA, past quarter (-42% decrease)
- 13 issues closed in JIRA, past quarter (-35% decrease)
- 357 commits in the past quarter (-33% decrease)
- 15 code contributors in the past quarter (-11% decrease)
- 33 PRs opened on GitHub, past quarter (10% increase)
- 33 PRs closed on GitHub, past quarter (17% increase)
- 201 Github Stars (up by 29)
- 355 @ApachePLC4X Twitter account followers (up by 50)

18 Mar 2020 [Christofer Dutz / Ted]

## Description:
The mission of the Apache PLC4X project is creating a set of libraries for
communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a
variety of protocols but with a shared API.

## Issues:
Currently nothing would require board attention

## Membership Data:
Apache PLC4X was founded 2019-04-17 (a year ago)
There are currently 14 committers and 9 PMC members in this project.
The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 7:5.

Community changes, past quarter:
- No new PMC members. Last addition was Łukasz Dywicki on 2019-07-28.
- Alvaro del Castillo was added as committer on 2020-01-29
- César García was added as committer on 2020-02-03
- Niklas Merz was added as committer on 2020-01-29
- Lukas Ott was added as committer on 2020-01-03
- Dominik Riemer was added as committer on 2020-02-04

## Project Activity:
- 0.6.0 was released on 2020-03-01

In December we had a 3 day code retreat, where a large portion of the
core-team meet and worked on addressing some of the most important
architectural challenges in preparation to porting all of our drivers to the
new generated codebase.

In general we have started to maintain and fix a lot of reported issues in the
0.6 branch which we now consider a LTS release branch. The version 0.7.0 is a
huge refactoring as we completely rewrote the core of PLC4X and are currently
deleting all existing drivers, replacing them with new version which we
generate from our new code-generation tool. Still 1-2 drivers to port, but
most of the others are already finished.

We completely relaunched our website, giving it a way more appealing look and
feel as we think the old website was preventing people from giving PLC4X a
chance.

We are currently in the process of preparing the ASF to become member of a
list of 4-5 industry foundation in order to allow us to legally be able to
provide some drivers and or mention them on our website and other public
information material.

We have had Meetups/Conference-Talks/Workshops:
- PLC4X full day workshop: Building IoT (02-03-2020)
- Talks: Building IoT - Essen (03-03-2020, 04-03-2020)
- Talk: Stuttgarter Innovationstage (03-03-2020)
- Talk: OOP - Munich (05-02-2020)

Perhaps worth mentioning:
In December Christofer applied for European research funds via NLnet
Foundation and was recently informed that his application was granted. So if
this really will happen, then these funds will be used 100% for driving the
C-type drivers for PLC4X as well as an Apache MyNewt integration.

## Community Health:
This year the number of contributors has grown quite a bit. Also the number of
people showing up from different companies has increased significantly.

Also starting this year we started to invite people as committer first and
stopped instantly inviting them as PMC in one go, as we noticed some people
became less active after becoming PMCs. At the same time we lowered the bar
for committership a little and redefined how we interpret the term
"committer". We treat committers as people who are committed to PLC4X and PMCs
who have proven to be so for a prolonged period of time (not too long)

- dev@plc4x.apache.org had a 59% increase in traffic in the past quarter
 (494 emails compared to 309)
- issues@plc4x.apache.org had a 444% increase in traffic in the past quarter
 (305 emails compared to 56)
- 23 issues opened in JIRA, past quarter (21% increase)
- 20 issues closed in JIRA, past quarter (42% increase)
- 490 commits in the past quarter (62% increase)
- 17 code contributors in the past quarter (13% increase)
- 28 PRs opened on GitHub, past quarter (21% increase)
- 27 PRs closed on GitHub, past quarter (28% increase)
- 172 Github Stars (up by 18 since last report) (up by 30)
- 305 @ApachePLC4X Twitter account followers (up by 33)

18 Dec 2019 [Christofer Dutz / Roman]

## Description:
The mission of the Apache PLC4X project is creating a set of libraries for
communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a
variety of protocols but with a shared API.

## Issues:
There are no issues requiring board attention.

## Membership Data:
Apache PLC4X was founded 2019-04-17 (8 months ago) There are currently 9
committers and 9 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is
1:1.

Community changes, past quarter:
- No new PMC members. Last addition was Łukasz Dywicki on 2019-07-28.
- No new committers. Last addition was Łukasz Dywicki on 2019-07-28.

However we just invited Lukas Ott to join the project as a comitter and he has
accepted the invitation. We are now waiting for his ICLA to be recorded on file.

## Project Activity:

Releases:
- 0.5.0 was released on 2019-11-25

Community Events:
- 2019-09-09 - 2019-09-12 ApacheCon NA 2019, Las Vegas, US (Multiple talks and
 hackathon)
- 2019-09-24 IoT Hessen, Kassel, Germany (From the chip to the cloud with
 Apache)
- 2019-10-22 - 2019-10-24 ApacheCon EU 2019, Berlin, Germany (Multiple talks
 and hackathon)
- 2019-11-26 ElasticSearch UG Meetup, Frankfurt, Germany (Introduction
 Logstash PLC4X Plugin)
- 2019-12-03 Apache IoT @ JUG Saar, Saarbrücken, Germany (From the chip to the
 cloud with Apache)
- 2019-12-11 Apache NiFi + Hacking around the IoTree, Frankfurt, Germany
 (Apache NiFi PLC4X Integration)

We have been continuing to port existing drivers to the new code-generation
framework. Also have we been implementing new protocols (Mostly based on paid
gigs from the industry). A lot of bug-fixing has been done and we're looking
forward to a big refactoring and brainstorming Hackathon form 2019-12-17 -
2019-12-19 in Weinheim, where we are going to work on a proposal for the
version 1.0.0 API.

## Community Health:

This quarter for most of the time activity on the mailing-list and in the
commits had dropped to worrying levels. This was mainly related to high
workload on the day-jobs of the community members. However in the past 2-3
weeks a lot of new people have joined discussions and submitted PRs and the
existing committer- and PMC activity has picked up again.

- dev@plc4x.apache.org had a 8% decrease in traffic in the past quarter (349
 emails compared to 379)
- issues@plc4x.apache.org had a 73% increase in traffic in the past quarter
 (132 emails compared to 76)
- 19 issues opened in JIRA, past quarter (46% increase)
- 13 issues closed in JIRA, past quarter (62% increase)
- 309 commits in the past quarter (-20% decrease)
- 23 PRs opened on GitHub, past quarter (91% increase)
- 20 PRs closed on GitHub, past quarter (66% increase)
- 29 contributors which have contributed code to the git repo (up by 3)
- 142 Github Stars (up by 18 since last report) (up by 43)
- 272 @ApachePLC4X Twitter account followers (up by 86)

We are very happy to see more people joining in from companies reporting to
use Apache PLC4X.

18 Sep 2019 [Christofer Dutz / Roman]

## Description:
The mission of the Apache PLC4X project is creating a set of libraries for
communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a
variety of protocols but with a shared API.

## Issues:
There are no issues requiring board attention.

## Membership Data:
Apache PLC4X was founded 2019-04-17 (5 months ago)
There are currently 9 committers and 9 PMC members in this project.
The Committer-to-PMC ratio is 1:1.

Community changes, past quarter:
- Łukasz Dywicki was added to the PMC on 2019-07-28
- Matthias Milan Strljic was added to the PMC on 2019-06-03
- Łukasz Dywicki was added as committer on 2019-07-28
- Matthias Milan Strljic was added as committer on 2019-06-03

## Project Activity:

Releases:
- 0.4.0 was released on 2019-05-26.

Community Events:
- 24.05.2019, Frankfurt (GER), Meetup: Industrial IoT goes Open Source: Apache
PLC4X Talks & Party
- 18.06.2019, Erfurt (GER), Meetup: Industrie & IoT: Die perfekte Verbindung
mit Flexibus & Apache PLC4X
- 29.08.2019, Frankfurt (GER), Meetup: Apache PLC4X Community Meetup

We have been working hard on the generated drivers side and are currently
approaching the finishing line on this feature. In parallel we had some major
refactoring of internal components such as the Scraper. A lot of work has
also been put into adding new integration modules (Logstash) as well as
improving existing ones (Apache Kafka Connect)

Also did we have some major improvements and bugfixes resulting from feedback
from enterprise usage.

Also the project is currently discussing the introduction of a computational
layer (most probably in a sub-project) mainly based on a proposed
code-donation.

## Community Health:

Slack has been more adopted for initial discussions and gossip, therefore
discussions on the mailing list have concentrated on technical discussions.

Also two of the main contributors have lately been very consumed with
outer-project activities.

- dev@plc4x.apache.org currently has 63 subscriptions (increase of 10 since
last report)
- dev@plc4x.apache.org had a 50% decrease in traffic in the past quarter (373
emails compared to 732)
- issues@plc4x.apache.org had a 48% decrease in traffic in the past quarter
(75 emails compared to 143)
- 11 issues opened in JIRA, past quarter (-73% decrease)
- 7 issues closed in JIRA, past quarter (-63% decrease)
- 380 commits in the past quarter (7% increase)
- 12 code contributors in the past quarter (-25% decrease)
- 9 PRs opened on GitHub, past quarter (-65% decrease)
- 9 PRs closed on GitHub, past quarter (-65% decrease)
- 26 contributors which have contributed code to the git repo
- 99 Github Stars (up by 18 since last report)
- 187 @ApachePLC4X Twitter account followers (up by 12 since last report)

Even if the mailing list numbers could give reason to feel otherwise, we think
our community is very healthy and growing at an increasing rate. More and
more potential committers are starting to work on different topics.

17 Jul 2019 [Christofer Dutz / Craig]

## Description:

 - Apache PLC4X is a set of libraries for communicating with industrial
   programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with
   a shared API.

## Issues:

 - there are no issues requiring board attention at this time

## Activity:

 - We have made great progress with the code generation and we're working on
   first next-gen drivers for Java.
 - Just recently a bug has been found and we're currently starting to work on
   a bugfix release 0.4.1.
 - We have split up our core repository into a plc4x-build-tools repository,
   which contains maven plugins and build related tools in order to keep
   releases simple.
 - On 2019-06-18 Christofer Dutz had a talk on Apache PLC4X at IoThüringen
   Meetup in Erfurt, Germany.
 - In total 5 talks dealing with Apache PLC4X have been accepted as part of
   the ACNA 2019 CFP.

## Health report:

 - The last month has been a little quieter as usual, as some of the major
   contributors have been busy with paid work tasks or fairs as well as with
   tasks related to other Apache committees in preparation for ApacheCon NA
   2019 in Las Vegas (TAC, Conference Plan, IoT Track-Chair duties).
 - As most of the tasks mentioned above have been finished, we are expecting
   the pace to pick up again.
 - Some new names have been popping up on the mailing-list.

## PMC changes:

 - Currently 8 PMC members.
 - New PMC members:
    - Björn Höper was added to the PMC on Mon May 13 2019
    - Matthias Milan Strljic was added to the PMC on Mon Jun 03 2019

## Committer base changes:

 - Currently 8 committers.
 - New commmitters:
    - Björn Höper was added as a committer on Wed May 08 2019
    - Matthias Milan Strljic was added as a committer on Mon Jun 03 2019

## Releases:

 - 0.4.0 was released on Mon May 27 2019

## Mailing list activity:

 - dev@plc4x.apache.org:
    - 53 subscribers (up 8 in the last 3 months):
    - 620 emails sent to list (519 in previous quarter)

 - issues@plc4x.apache.org:
    - 7 subscribers (up 1 in the last 3 months):
    - 85 emails sent to list (70 in previous quarter)

## JIRA activity:

 - 24 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months
 - 13 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months

## Other Numbers:

 - 81 GitHub Stars (Up by 15 in last month)
 - 174 Twitter Followers (@ApachePLC4X account) (up by 8 in last month)

19 Jun 2019 [Christofer Dutz / Joan]

## Description:
 - Apache PLC4X is a set of libraries for communicating with industrial
   programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with
   a shared API.

## Issues:
 - none

## Activity:
 - Part of our team attended the European Union EU-FOSSA2 Hackathon in
   Brussels, which was a huge success. Not only did we work on quite a lot of
   different topics, but we managed to win 2-3 new people for the project,
   some of which have become quite active since then.

 - We managed to add OPC-UA client support with a new Java OPC-UA driver. This
   was a highly requested feature in the past.

 - Our multi-language configuration work has progressed very well and we
   hardened our build to do some pre-build-diagnostics in order to assist new
   contributors with setting up the project. We are currently fine-tuning this
   tooling. At the moment our build works fine with: Java, C++, C# and Python
   on Mac, Linux and Windows systems and we are able to release all of these
   with our standard release procedure. This has been proven by our first TLP
   release (Apache PLC4X 0.4.0) which is also the by far best tested and
   reviewed RC we ever had. Maximum KUDOs to our team for this.

 - We are currently working hard on finding ways to generate the boilerplate
   code for the drivers. Multiple people are working on different proposals
   for this. We are expecting to consolidate these into a new workflow within
   the next few months.

 - On 24th May 2019 we had our first Meetup as TLP and used this to also do a
   little graduation party where a big part of the community attended


## Plans for the future:
 - We hope to consolidate the code-generation initiatives and form a standard
   code-generation workflow for the project.

 - As soon as that's done we will start converting more and more protocols
   into a form so we can generate the drivers in the future.

 - Also do we need more working ports of existing drivers for generating
   code-generation templates for other languages than Java.


## Health report:
 - We would claim that the project is currently very healthy. We have several
   prospects for being invited into the PMC soon.

## PMC changes:

 - Currently 8 PMC members.
 - Matthias Strljic was added to the PMC on Mon June 3 2019

## Committer base changes:

 - Currently 8 committers.
 - Matthias Strljic was added as a committer on Mon June 3 2019

## Releases:

 - 0.4.0 was released on Mon May 27 2019 (Our first TLP release)

## Mailing list activity:

 - dev@plc4x.apache.org:
    - 52 subscribers (up 7 in the last 3 months):
    - 754 emails sent to list (363 in previous quarter)

 - issues@plc4x.apache.org:
    - 7 subscribers (up 1 in the last 3 months):
    - 150 emails sent to list (0 in previous quarter)

## JIRA activity:

 - 44 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months
 - 21 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months

## Other activity and social media:
 - 172 Twitter followers of the @ApachePLC4X account (up by 12)
 - 67 GitHub Stars (up by 1)

15 May 2019 [Christofer Dutz / Roman]

Apache PLC4X is a set of libraries for communicating with industrial
programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a
shared API.

# Project Status:

We are currently in the post graduation phase. All post-graduation tasks have
been performed and project activity is picking up again after finishing the
pre- and post-graduation work. Also did we invest a lot of effort in preparing
the project (especially the build) for upcoming activity with additional
languages such as C# and Python. The graduation media coverage was quite
extensive and did bring a lot of inquiries from outside entities which we are
currently processing. There is a lot of potential for new contributors as well
as cooperation with other open source initiatives.

# Issues, the board needs to be aware of or act on:

none

# Activity since last report:

This is our first report as TLP, so this answer will refer to the time since
the last podling report, which was last month.

Mostly pre- and post-graduation work. Handling inquiries from external
entities as a result of the graduation media attention. A lot of discussions
about other languages and driver generation have been has on the mailing list
and the build was prepared for the challenges of the near future.

# Plans for the near future:

A delegation of 3 PMCs and 2 non-PMCs will be attending the European Union
EU-FOSSA2 Hackathon in Brussels with the goal to grow the public awareness as
well as the community.

We are currently working on setting up a Python API where we will be testing
providing an intermediate solution to the unavailability of native drivers in
other languages by bundling a Java server with Python client.

In parallel there are currently two initiatives for defining a way to formally
specify industrial protocols and to generate native code in multiple languages
from these definitions. These efforts will be an ongoing effort for the next
months.

We will be having a first PLC4X Meetup in the next month or two where we will
also be doing a little graduation party.

# Numbers:

Mailing List Subscriptions: 45 (up by 2) Twitter Followers: 160 (up by 30)
GitHub Stars: 62 (up by 10) Last release: 2019-03-13: PLC4X (incubating) 0.3.1
(Last release from the incubator)

# Last election of Committers/PMCs:

2019-02-04: Tim Mitsch (PPMC and committer)

# PMC and Committer diversity:

no issues

# Project branding or naming issues:

none

# Legal issues or questions:

none

# Infrastructure issues or strategic needs:

none

17 Apr 2019

Establish the Apache PLC4X Project

 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, for distribution at no charge to
 the public, related to a set of libraries for communicating with
 industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of
 protocols but with a shared API.

 NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that a Project Management Committee
 (PMC), to be known as the "Apache PLC4X Project", be and hereby is
 established pursuant to Bylaws of the Foundation; and be it further

 RESOLVED, that the Apache PLC4X Project be and hereby is responsible for
 the creation and maintenance of software related to a set of libraries
 for communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs)
 using a variety of protocols but with a shared API; and be it further

 RESOLVED, that the office of "Vice President, Apache PLC4X" 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 Apache PLC4X
 Project, and to have primary responsibility for management of the
 projects within the scope of responsibility of the Apache PLC4X
 Project; and be it further

 RESOLVED, that the persons listed immediately below be and hereby are
 appointed to serve as the initial members of the Apache PLC4X Project:

 * Christofer Dutz <cdutz@apache.org>
 * Julian Feinauer <jfeinauer@apache.org>
 * Justin Mclean <jmclean@apache.org>
 * Tim Mitsch <tmitsch@apache.org>
 * Sebastian Rühl <sruehl@apache.org>
 * Markus Sommer <msommer@apache.org>

 NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Christofer Dutz be
 appointed to the office of Vice President, Apache PLC4X, 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 Apache PLC4X Project be and hereby is tasked with the
 migration and rationalization of the Apache Incubator PLC4X podling; and
 be it further

 RESOLVED, that all responsibilities pertaining to the Apache Incubator
 PLC4X podling encumbered upon the Apache Incubator PMC are hereafter
 discharged.

 Special Order 7C, Establish the Apache PLC4X Project, was
 approved by Unanimous Vote of the directors present.

17 Apr 2019

PLC4X is a set of libraries for communicating with industrial programmable
logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a shared API.

PLC4X has been incubating since 2017-12-18.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

 1.Vote on graduation on IPMC general list

Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?

 Not at the moment.

How has the community developed since the last report?

 Previously added PPMC/Committers have setup and the onboarding process
 has been pretty successful. One new name has showed up on the list
 demonstrating willingness to help with the website and documentation.

 Now in total 3 people have demonstrated the ability to perform releases.
 We are currently tying up some loose ends and preparing everything to
 start the graduation vote in the next few weeks. All of this has been
 consuming quite some time.

 We have had a meetup in Nürtingen on 15th of February which a great part
 of the active PPMC and committers attended. Beyond that on 21th of
 February
 Christofer had a talk on PLC4X at EURegJug in Aachen, on 8th of March in
 Solingen.

 Numbers:
 - Releases:
   - 0.3.0 RC2: 05.02.2019 (RM: Julian Feinauer)
   - 0.3.1 RC1: 13.03.2019 (RM: Julian Feinauer, but Tim Mitsch actually
   did it)
 - Mailing-list Subscriptions: 43 (up by 1)
 - Twitter followers: 132 (up by 18)
 - GitHub stars: 52 (up by 10)

How has the project developed since the last report?

 Christofer is working hard on implementing a first POC for a tooling to
 generate drivers from DFDL and SCXML specifications, which will greatly
 simplify driver implementation as well as make it possible to generate
 drivers for multiple target languages, such as C++.

 No new POCs have been performed this period however another company has
 shifted to using PLC4X as main integration platform in their analytics
 software. Also a consortium of 3 companies and the ISW from Stuttgart
 University received a positive response to a project proposal that was
 supported for the funding program "KMU Innovativ" at BMBF German ministry
 of education and research. PLC4X will play an important role in the
 project for communication with industrial controllers and will be
 integrated by the industrial partner pragmatic minds GmbH which is
 represented in the (P)PMC by Julian Feinauer.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?
Please feel free to add your own commentary.

 [ ] Initial setup
 [ ] Working towards first release
 [ ] Community building
 [X] Nearing graduation
 [ ] Other:

Date of last release:

 2019-03-13 0.3.1 RC1

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

 2019-02-04 Tim Mitsch (PPMC and committer)

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive or are things falling
through the cracks? In the latter case, please list any open issues
that need to be addressed.

 They have been very helpful. Especially regarding questions about
 graduating, Justin has been particularly helpful in pointing out
 some missing things.

Signed-off-by:

 [X](plc4x) Greg Trasuk
    Comments:
 [X](plc4x) Justin Mclean
    Comments:
 [X](plc4x) Stefan Bodewig
    Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

16 Jan 2019

PLC4X is a set of libraries for communicating with industrial programmable
logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a shared API.

PLC4X has been incubating since 2017-12-18.

Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:

 1. Building the community: The PPMC and committer group has a large
 percentage of codecentric employees, we have been recruiting people from
 other companies, but will have to continue these efforts for establishing
 a healthy Apache community.
 2. With PLC4X several people on the team are not very familiar with the
 Apache Way. We have started and will continue our efforts on this
 onboarding.
 3. Make others in the PPMC able to perform releases.

Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?

 Not at the moment.

How has the community developed since the last report?

 We have managed to get some more people to contribute. While we are still
 waiting for the initial contribution (OPC-UA Server) of one person to be
 submitted, we were just able to successfully integrate another first code
 contribution into our build which seeds the C++ API module (Thanks to
 Markus Sommer for this).

 Github notes the number of contributors has gone up to 12 … so I think
 we’re looking good as we are continuously getting more people on board,
 hopefully soon also into committership and PPMC involvement.

 In the last quarter of 2018 Christofer Dutz had several public talks on
 PLC4X:

 * 09.10.2018: “Between the towers” Meetup, Frankfurt
 * 24.10.2018: “Oss Summit Europe” Conference, Edinburgh
 * 13.11.2018: “3. Fachkonferenz - Big data in der Industire“ Conference,
 Berlin
 * 15.11.2018: „RheinJUG“ Meetup, Düsseldorf
 * 06.12.2018: „IoTHessen“ Meetup, Frankfurt

 From 22.11.2018-26.11.2018 we had our second official community event:
 This  time we meet at the codecentric finca on Mallorca for 4 days of
 hacking, coding, discussions and community building.

 All in all 3 PPMC members participated and one new person.

 On 03.12.2018 we successfully released: Version 0.2.0 (RC1) and we’re
 currently working on enabling new release-managers for the next release.

 Our mailing list subscriptions went up another 4 to currently 42
 subscribers.

 Our Twitter followers increased by 57 (almost doubled) to 116 followers
 (Mainly as a direct result of @Java tweeting about us).

 On GitHub we now have 42 “Stars” (increase of 18) and 20 “Forks”
 (increase of 6)

 We have successfully performed two major POCs with customers from the
 industry (Companies in the pharmaceutical and automotive sectors) and the
 results where overwhelming.

 We are expecting to see more adoption in 2019. Also are we trying to
 convince companies to allow us to officially talk about what we did in
 order to spread the word.

 Also have we had first paid contracts where the companies were paying
 members of the project to implement some general purpose features that
 were missing as well as bug fixing and allowing those results to become
 part of the open-source project (Which I think is pretty surprising as
 the concept of Open-Source is quite new to these companies)

 How would you assess the podling's maturity?

 We have a mix of new participants and experienced Apache people involved.

 So far, the new participants have shown great willingness and success in
 adopting the Apache Way.
 However, we still need to continue: the on-boarding increasing the
 diversity of the team.
 Also we are currently trying to enable other team members to take over
 vital roles (Like being a release manager) so we no longer have areas
 with personal singularities.

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

 [ ] Initial setup
 [ ] Working towards first release
 [X] Community building
 [ ] Nearing graduation
 [ ] Other:

Date of last release:

 2018-12-03

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive or are things falling
through the cracks? In the latter case, please list any open issues
that need to be addressed.

Signed-off-by:

 [ ](plc4x) Greg Trasuk
    Comments:
 [X](plc4x) Justin Mclean
    Comments:
 [X](plc4x) Stefan Bodewig
    Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

17 Oct 2018

PLC4X is a set of libraries for communicating with industrial programmable
logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a shared API.

Most important issues to address while moving towards graduation:

 Building the community: The PPMC and committer group has a large
 percentage of codecentric employees, we have been recruiting people
 from other companies, but will have to continue these efforts for
 establishing a healthy Apache community.
 Onboarding of new committers: With PLC4X several people on the team are
 not very familiar with the Apache Way. We have started and will continue
 our efforts on this onboarding.

Any Issues the Incubator PMC or ASF Board might wish/need to be aware of:

 Not at the moment.

How has the community developed since the last report?

 While the community activity had been quite low since the beginning of
 the project, things changed in August.
 Then we noticed not only new names appearing on the list, but the number
 of emails on the list grew by 400%-500%.
 Also did we get several pull requests from about 5 new names,
 contributing to multiple areas.
 Two of them got added to the Committers and PPMC groups.
 The others were one-shot contributions without any further communications.

In September Christofer Dutz had two talks on PLC4X at two conferences:

 *   Solutions Hamburg 2018
 *   ApacheCon NA 2018

 An article on PLC4X by Christofer Dutz was published in the German Tech
 Magazine: iX
 (Link to the article:
https://www.heise.de/select/ix/2018/8/1533352444905693)

 Also, just before ApacheCon we also had our first PLC4X Meetup where
 several current contributors as well as very interested new people were
 present.

 Also did we successfully vote in our first two new committers and PPMC
 members.

 *   Julian Feinauer (pragmatic industries)
 *   Andrey Skorikov (codecentric)

 Finally just before finishing this report we also finished our first
 release:
 Version 0.1.0

 Our mailing list subscriptions went up another 9 to currently 38
 subscribers.
 Our Twitter followers increased by 18 to 59 followers.

 On GitHub we now have 24 “Stars” and 14 “Forks”

 Business interest has increased dramatically as more and more companies
 are signalling their willingness to try out PLC4X and some are currently
 even in the transition phase of porting their products to PLC4X.

How does the podling rate their own maturity?

 We have a mix of new participants and experienced Apache people involved.
 So far, the new participants have shown great willingness and success in
 adopting the Apache Way.
 However, we still need to continue: the on-boarding increasing the
 diversity of the team.
 After our first official release, we will now fine-tune this release
 process and try to educate other people on the team to also be able to do
 releases.

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive or are things falling
through the cracks? In the latter case, please list any open issues
that need to be addressed.

 Yes. All of our mentors have been responsive and have helped.

Signed-off-by:

 [ ](plc4x) Greg Trasuk
    Comments:
 [X](plc4x) Justin Mclean
    Comments:
 [X](plc4x) Stefan Bodewig
    Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

18 Jul 2018

PLC4X is a set of libraries for communicating with industrial programmable
logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a shared API.

PLC4X has been incubating since 2017-12-18.

Most important issues to address while moving towards graduation:

Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:

 1. Building the community: The PPMC and committer group has a large
percentage of codecentric employees, we have been recruiting people from
other companies, but will have to continue these efforts for establishing a
healthy Apache community.
 2. Onboarding of new committers: With PLC4X several people on the team are
not very familiar with the Apache Way. We have started and will continue our
efforts on this onboarding.
 3. Make our first release

Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?

Not at the moment.

How has the community developed since the last report?

Christofer has invested most of his time in May and June spreading the word
about PLC4X.

There have been several conference talks on PLC4X:

 * Building IoT 2018 in Cologne: Christofer Dutz – Industrial IoT und Edge
Computing mit Apache PLC4X und Apache Edgent
 * @Vanced Network Meetup in Solingen: Christofer Dutz – Open-Source in der
Industrie mit Apache PLC4X
 * Apache Roadshow EU in Berlin: Christofer Dutz - Revolutionizing the
Production Industry with Apache PLC4X

A blog post in a major corporate tech-blog has been published with the
content of the JavaSPEKTRUM article on Apache Edgent and Apache PLC4X:
https://blog.codecentric.de/2018/06/edge-computing-industrial-iot-apache-edge
nt-apache-plc4x/

As a direct result on a talk in Berlin about mentoring new committers,
we have started creating “low-hanging-fruit” tagged issues and have
started promoting them.  As a result we have 2 potential contributors
interested in tackling these. Hopefully this will result in continued
activity from their side.

We have reached out to a developer offering Modbus, EthernetIP and
OPC-UA drivers on his Github page to get him to join our efforts.

The dev-list subscriptions has gone up by 7 (now 29) from the last
report.

We now have a Twitter account: https://twitter.com/ApachePlc4x as
another channel of communicating interesting PLC4X facts.  After
tweeting a lot about our project, the number of followers to that has
drastically increased to 41

How has the project developed since the last report?

We have setup a VPN for the CI server and other committers to be able
to communicate with real PLCs, however this feature has not proven to
improve the involvement of other committers so far.

We have recently found a set of git repos with Apache licensed code
for accessing Modbus, Ethernet/IP and UPC-UA devices. We have reached
out to the original developer to maybe get him on board with our team.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

We have a mix of new participants and experienced Apache people
involved.  So far, the new participants have shown great willingness
and success in adopting the Apache Way.  However, we still need to
continue: the on-boarding increasing the diversity of the team Also,
will we need to decide and establish all the processes involved in
releasing software at Apache

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

 [ ] Initial setup
 [X] Working towards first release
 [ ] Community building
 [ ] Nearing graduation
 [ ] Other:

Date of last release:

 N/A

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

 N/A

Signed-off-by:

 [ ](plc4x) Greg Trasuk
    Comments:
 [X](plc4x) Justin Mclean
    Comments:
 [X](plc4x) Stefan Bodewig
    Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

18 Apr 2018

PLC4X is a set of libraries for communicating with industrial programmable
logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a shared API.

Most important issues to address while moving towards graduation:

Building the community: The PPMC and committer group has a large percentage of
codecentric employees, we have been recruiting people from other companies,
but will have to continue these efforts for establishing a healthy Apache
community. Onboarding of new committers: With PLC4X several people on the team
are not very familiar with the Apache Way. We have started and will continue
our efforts on this onboarding. Make our first release

Any Issues the Incubator PMC or ASF Board might wish/need to be aware of:

In contrast to previous reports some of the concerns regarding availability
and usability of specifications have been resolved. Especially for using the
Modbus and the OPC-UA specifications Christofer was able to get official
permissions from the corresponding foundations to use the specifications.
These permission Emails have been filed in the private list for documentation.

One of the external foundations (Profinet) doesn’t have a free membership. In
general, the CEO of the European branch of the Profinet Foundation has
signaled that it should be possible for the ASF to become a member and have an
outside company pay the membership fees, but we have to discuss the details
(With them as well as the ASF).

How has the community developed since the last report?

Christofer has invested most of his time in March spreading the word about
PLC4X. A first POC has been created for a company which is currently going
into production An article about Apache Edgent and Apache PLC4X has been
published as a cover-story in the German JavaSPEKTRUM magazines Industrial IoT
special edition (https://www.sigs-datacom.de/digital/javaspektrum/). One PLC4X
talk has been accepted to the Apache EU Roadshow 2018 in Berlin and one will
be at the Silpion Techcamp in Hamburg (https://techcamp.hamburg/) in the first
April week.

The dev-list subscriptions has gone up by one from February, we are hoping to
increase the number in the next few weeks (However quite some emails come in
from un-registered users that have to pass moderation).

We now have a Twitter account: https://twitter.com/ApachePlc4x as another
channel of communicating interesting PLC4X facts.

How has the project developed since the last report?

We have been working hard on making better use of the ASF build
infrastructure. Especially regarding setting up our project VM at
plc4x-vm.apache.org this effort will be continued. After receiving the
permission to use and implement the Modbus protocol, the Driver skeletons have
been setup, but no real implementation of the protocol itself has been done
yet. We are still hoping for volunteers to step up as interest in implementing
the Modbus protocol has been explicitly mentioned by community memebers. The
work on the RawSocket Netty transport which is a requirement to implement
protocols that are IP based, but are not TCP or UDP has continued and we are
currently working on some of the quirks on Linux based operating-systems. We
added Netty support for IO over serial ports and will be using this in the
Beckhoff module as a first protocol. We are still working on the S7 Protocol
fragmentation and hope to be able to finish this in April. Also we discussed
on the list about how the others would think of initiating a first release of
PLC4X.

How does the podling rate their own maturity?

We have a mix of new participants and experienced Apache people involved. So
far, the new participants have shown great willingness and success in adopting
the Apache Way. However, we still need to continue:
the on-boarding increasing the diversity of the team Also, will we need to
decide and establish all the processes involved in releasing software at
Apache



Signed-off-by:

 [X](plc4x) Greg Trasuk
    Comments:
 [X](plc4x) Justin Mclean
    Comments:
 [x](plc4x) Luciano Resende
    Comments:
 [X](plc4x) Stefan Bodewig
    Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

 Drew Farris (shepherd): Three mentors active on the mailing list. Active
 project.

21 Mar 2018

PLC4X is a set of libraries for communicating with industrial programmable
logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a shared API.

PLC4X has been incubating since 2017-12-18.
Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:

 1. Building the community: The PPMC and committer group has a large
    percentage of codecentric employees, we have been recruiting people
    from other companies, but will have to continue these efforts for
    establishing a healthy Apache community.
 2. Onboarding of new committers: With PLC4X several people on the team
    are not very familiar with the Apache Way. We have started and will
    continue our efforts on this onboarding.
 3. Make our first release

Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?

In order to get access to some of the specifications the ASF will eventually
have to become Members of some external foundations: OPC, EtherCat, Modbus …
these memberships usually have a free level, that allows us to use the
specifications but doesn’t result in any regular costs. We will have to discuss
these details with the ASF and the other foundations.
One of the external foundations (Profinet) doesn’t have a free membership. In
general, the CEO of the European branch of the Profinet Foundation has signaled
that it should be possible for the ASF to become a member and have an outside
company pay the membership fees, but we have to discuss the details (With them
as well as the ASF).

How has the community developed since the last report?

Christofer has invested most of his time in February spreading the word about
PLC4X.
A first POC has been created for the company “Kampf Schneid- und Wickeltechnik
GmbH & Co. KG”
Two articles for IoT Special editions of German tech magazines have been
submitted. The “JavaSPEKTURM – IoT Sonderheft” is scheduled for sale end or
March, the “iX – IoT Sonderheft” is scheduled later.
The university of Stuttgart has shown great interest in joining our effort, as
they had just started a project with a similar goal. Chris will continue
on-boarding efforts in March.
At this year’s AALE Conference in Cologne, Chris has talked to a lot of people
from different German universities. We’re hoping to get at least a hand full of
them on board too.
We have continuing our onboarding of new Apache committers (extended emails
with a lot of explanations on why we are doing things the way we are)
In the next few months we are expecting to spread the word and hopefully grow
the community due to the tech magazine articles as well as several talks on
different conferences.

How has the project developed since the last report?

The work on the RawSocket Netty transport which is a requirement to implement
protocols that are IP based, but are not TCP or UDP has continued and we are
currently waiting for infra to setup a dedicated Jenkins VM for our project so
we can enable the RawSocket releated tests.
We have finished a first version of the Beckhoff ADS driver, and are looking
forward to first tests with this.
The functionality of the S7 driver has improved due to experience collected
with the Kampf POC.
Next we are aiming to implement Modbus and OPC-UA protocols.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?
Please feel free to add your own commentary.

We have a mix of new participants and experienced Apache people involved.
So far, the new participants have shown great willingness and success in
adopting the Apache Way.
However, we still need to continue:
the on-boarding
increasing the diversity of the team
Also, will we need to decide and establish all the processes involved in
releasing software at Apache

 [X] Initial setup
 [X] Working towards first release
 [ ] Community building
 [ ] Nearing graduation
 [ ] Other:

Date of last release:

 XXXX-XX-XX

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?



Signed-off-by:

 [ ](plc4x) Greg Trasuk
    Comments:
 [X](plc4x) Justin Mclean
    Comments:
 [ ](plc4x) Luciano Resende
    Comments:
 [X](plc4x) Stefan Bodewig

21 Feb 2018

PLC4X is a set of libraries for communicating with industrial programmable
logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a shared API.

PLC4X has been incubating since 2017-12-18.

Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:

 1. Building the community: The PPMC and committer group has a large percentage of
codecentric employees, we have been recruiting people from other companies, but
will have to continue these efforts for establishing a healthy Apache community.
Onboarding of new committers: With PLC4X several people on the team are not
very familiar with the Apache Way. We have started and will continue our
efforts on this onboarding.
 2. Making our first release.

Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?

In order to get access to some of the specifications the ASF will eventually
have to become Members of some external foundations: OPC, EtherCat, Modbus …
these memberships usually have a free level, that allows us to use the
specifications but doesn’t result in any regular costs. We will have to discuss
these details with the ASF and the other foundations.

One of the external foundations (Profinet) doesn’t have a free membership. In
general, the CEO of the European branch of the Profinet Foundation has signaled
that it should be possible for the ASF to become a member and have an outside
company pay the membership fees, but we have to discuss the details (With them
as well as the ASF).


How has the community developed since the last report?

We have finished the process of getting setup at Apache.

The Podling Name Search has been resolved successfully
(https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PODLINGNAMESEARCH-136)

In of January a list of about 40 different companies, which have indicated
interest in PLC4X in personal discussions have been directly contacted
regarding our project, some have subscribed to our mailing lists.
A small number of new people have been popping up on our mailing lists.

On 23rd of January Christofer Dutz had a talk PLC4X at the Nortec 2018
conference in Hamburg (Production industry conference)
(https://www.nortec-hamburg.de/).

We have continuing our onboarding of new Apache committers (extended emails
with a lot of explanations on why we are doing things the way we are)
Testing coverage has been improved over the initial code base.

With Beckhoff, we managed to get a first major PLC vendor to support us with
software as well as technical support. We hope on this having a signal-effect
on other vendors.

How has the project developed since the last report?

Test coverage and SonarQube reported issues have been addressed hereby greatly
increasing the quality of the initial POC code.

A lot of code and architecture reviews have been done which lead to great
improvements in the API itself.

We have started work on a RawSocket Netty transport which is a requirement to
implement protocols that are IP based, but are not TCP or UDP.

We have started work on implementing a driver for the Beckhoff ADS protocol.
(Beckhoff has been very helpful with providing Specs and Support for setting
up a test environment.)

How would you assess the podling's maturity?
Please feel free to add your own commentary.

 [X] Initial setup
 [X] Working towards first release
 [X] Community building
 [ ] Nearing graduation
 [ ] Other:

Date of last release:

 None yet

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

 None elected beyond initial committers.

Signed-off-by:

 [ ](plc4x) Greg Trasuk
    Comments:
 [X](plc4x) Justin Mclean
    Comments:
 [X](plc4x) Luciano Resende
    Comments:
 [ ](plc4x) Stefan Bodewig
    Comments:

17 Jan 2018

PLC4X is a set of libraries for communicating with industrial programmable
logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a shared API.


PLC4X has been incubating since 2017-12-18.

Most important issues to address while moving towards graduation:

  *   Building the community: The PPMC and committer group has a large
      percentage of codecentric employees, we have been recruiting people from
      other companies, but will have to continue these efforts for
      establishing a healthy Apache community.
  *   Onboarding of new committers: With PLC4X several people on the team are
      not very familiar with the Apache Way. We have started and will continue
      our efforts on this onboarding.
  *   Podling name search: We have invested a lot of time on the name search
      prior to starting to work on the project, but we still need the official
      OK that we’re allowed to keep the Name of Apache PLC4X.
 *    Make our first release

Any Issues the Incubator PMC or ASF Board might wish/need to be aware of:

  *   In order to get access to some of the specifications the ASF will
      eventually have to become Members of some external foundations: OPC,
      EtherCat, Modbus … these memberships usually have a free level, that
      allows us to use the specifications but doesn’t result in any regular
      costs. We will have to discuss these details with the ASF and the other
      foundations.
  *   One of the external foundations (Profinet) doesn’t have a free
      membership. In general, the CEO of the European branch of the Profinet
      Foundation has signaled that it should be possible for the ASF to become
      a member and have an outside company pay the membership fees, but we
      have to discuss the details (With them as well as the ASF).

How has the community developed since the last report?

  *   We have been accepted into the Apache Incubator just a week before
      Christmas, we are still in the process of setting up
  *   Prior to joining the Apache Incubator however, we have managed to
      recruit people from other Apache projects and are working on getting
      other people familiar with the protocols and the industry involved.
      After the Christmas break we are planning on contacting a big group of
      people that have claimed to be wanting to be involved (A list of about
      20 Companies, but we can’t tell how many will be using and how many
      would also be willing to contribute)
  *   We have started the onboarding of new committers and will be continuing
      to do this (extended emails with a lot of explanations on why we are
      doing things the way we are)
  *   Project has bootstrapped quickly and we have mailing lists, website,
      JIRA etc. all set up and running.
  *   Testing coverage has been improved over the initial code base

How has the project developed since the last report?

  *   There was no last report.

How does the podling rate their own maturity?

  *   We have a mix of new participants and experienced Apache people
      involved.
  *   So far, the new participants have shown great willingness and success in
      adopting the Apache Way.
  *   However, we still need to continue:
     *   the on-boarding
     *   increasing the diversity of the team
  *   Also, will we need to decide and establish all the processes involved in
      releasing software at Apache


Date of last release:

  N/A

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

  N/A

Signed-off-by:

  [X](plc4x) Greg Trasuk
     Comments:
  [X](plc4x) Justin Mclean
     Comments:
  [x](plc4x) Luciano Resende
     Comments:
  [X](plc4x) Stefan Bodewig
     Comments: