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The Apache Software Foundation
Board of Directors Meeting Minutes
18 September 2002
1. Call to order
The meeting was scheduled for 10:00am PDT -0700 and began when a
a sufficient attendance to constitute a quorum was recognized by the
chairman at 10:07am. The meeting was held by teleconference
hosted by Jim Jagielski (Covalent).
IRC #apacheboard on irc.openprojects.net was used for backup
purposes.
2. Roll Call
Directors Present:
Brian Behlendorf
Ken Coar
Roy T. Fielding
Dirk-Willem van Gulik
Jim Jagielski
Ben Laurie
Sam Ruby
Greg Stein
Randy Terbush
Directors Absent:
None
Guests:
3. Minutes from the meeting of 18 August 2002
The minutes of last meeting detailed in board_minutes_2002_08_21.txt
were amended to change the words "by majority vote" to "by unanimous
vote" regarding the election of Jim to Exec. V.P./Secretary. By general
consent, board minutes were approved as amended.
4. Officer Reports
A. President [Dirk]
Dirk had nothing of detail to report. There was discussion regarding
APR and the issues regarding El-Kabong (the HTML parser) that was
donated to the ASF. There was also discussion regarding how much of
the President's duties were infrastructure in nature.
B. Treasurer [Randy]
Randy reported that via Ben Hyde he had received a copy of Quickbooks
for the ASF use. Randy reported that all know compensations regarding
the ApacheCon 2001 that was budgeted for and approved had been
completed. There was discussion regarding the need for an overview
of the ASF budget requirements of the last few years in order to create
a valid working budget. It was generally agreed that a need for such a
budget exercise exists.
C. Exec. V.P. and Secretary [Jim]
Jim reported that he had contacted CSC regarding the required paperwork
involved in changing the Officers On Record of the ASF. CSC was to send
such paperwork to Jim. Jim also reported that he was in the process
of scanning such public documents as agreements so that they could be
posted in CVS and on site.
Jim reported 2 software contributions received by the ASF: A HTML
Parser ("El-Kabong") by Covalent Technologies and mod_python by
Gregory (Grisha) Trubetskoy.
5. Committee Reports
A. Conference Planning [Ken]
See Attachment A
B. Fund-raising [Randy]
Randy reported that he would be sending out a call to members to
obtain a final list of volunteers for the PMC. He stated a desire
to keep the number small, no more than 5.
C. PMC: PHP Project [Rasmus Lerdorf]
See Attachment C
D. PMC: TCL Project [David Welton]
See Attachment D
E. PMC: XML Project [Ted Leung]
See Attachment E
F. PMC: APR Project [Ryan Bloom]
See Attachment F
G. PMC: DB Project [Jason van Zyl]
This report was not submitted before the meeting. Please see
the supplementary report.
H. PMC: HTTP Server Project [Ben Hyde]
See Attachment G
I. PMC: Jakarta Project [Sam Ruby]
See Attachment H
J. PMC: Java Community Process [Jason Hunter]
This report was not submitted before the meeting. Please see
the supplementary report.
K. PMC: Perl Project [Doug MacEachern]
This report was not submitted before the meeting. Please see
the supplementary report.
6. Special Orders
A) Apache Commons Project
The following resolution (R1) was proposed.
Resolution R1:
WHEREAS, the Board of Directors deems it to be in the best
interests of the Foundation and consistent with the
Foundation's purpose to establish a Project Management
Committee charged with the creation and maintenance of
open-source software related to reusable libraries and
components, for distribution at no charge to the public.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that a Project Management
Committee (PMC), to be known as the "Apache Commons PMC", be
and hereby is established pursuant to Bylaws of the Foundation;
and be it further
RESOLVED, that the Apache Commons PMC be and hereby is
responsible for the creation and maintenance of software
related to reusable libraries and components, based on software
licensed to the Foundation; and be it further
RESOLVED, that the office of "Vice President, Apache Commons"
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 Commons PMC, and to have primary responsibility
for management of the projects within the scope of
responsibility of the Apache Commons PMC; and be it further
RESOLVED, that the persons listed immediately below be and
hereby are appointed to serve as the initial members of the
Apache Commons PMC:
Aaron Bannert
Ken Coar (chair)
Peter Donald
Justin Erenkrantz
Brian W. Fitzpatrick
Jim Jagielski
Geir Magnusson Jr.
Greg Stein
Sander Striker
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Ken Coar be and
hereby is appointed to the office of Vice President, Apache
Commons, to serve in accordance with and subject to the
direction of the Board of Directors and the Bylaws of the
Foundation until death, resignation, retirement, removal or
disqualification, or until a successor is appointed; and be it
further
RESOLVED, that the initial Apache Commons PMC be and hereby is
tasked with the creation of a set of bylaws intended to
encourage open development and increased participation in the
Apache Commons Project.
There was considerable heated debate regarding this resolution. Those
opposing the resolution stated that the written text of the resolution
did not match the oral descriptions of what the PMC was designed to do.
Another core point of disagreement was whether the resolution itself
was designed to be an end in-and-of itself, or a stepping stone to a
larger reorganization itself. A vote was called, with the results of:
4 Yea.
3 Nay
1 Abstain
1 Absent
Therefore Resolution R1 passes.
7. Unfinished Business
A) STV instead of FPP for members meeting votes
Ben Laurie was tasked with bringing the matter up to members
to obtain their comments and feedback.
Executive summary: each voter lists all the people they want to see
elected in order of preference. Excess votes for people who have
already reached their quota (i.e. enough votes to ensure election)
and also for the candidate with the least votes are redistributed
to lower-numbered choices. Process is repeated until the required
number are elected.
http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/votingsystems/stvi.htm
B) PeerMetrics proposal for a project based on Rabbit (P2P)
Ken volunteered to research and provide information for the next
board meeting.
Message-Id: <20020528165522.F18518@Lithium.MeepZor.Com>
forwarded from May 22, "Tim Motika" <tim@peermetrics.com>
8. New Business
A) discussion about a Code Donation committee.
This was tabled.
B) There was discussion regarding whether it was useful that
Concom have the means and authority to provide supplemental
funds to ASF members for the purpose of attending ApacheCon
if they were unable to afford the expense. The general consent
was that such authority was beneficial.
9. Announcements
None.
10. Adjournment
Scheduled to adjourn by 11:30am PDT -0700. Adjourned at 11:51am.
============
ATTACHMENTS:
============
----------------------------------------
Attachment A: Status Report for Conference Planning
Registration for ApacheCon is finally open (as of Tuesday 17 September
2002), after several weeks of back-and-forthing with the registration
company about data transmission. As of Wednesday morning (EDT), we
have sixty people registered; from those, 79 tutorial classes have
been selected. (The discrepancy is because there are morning and
afternoon tutorials, so it could be as high as 120 given the
registration count.) Apple Computer is so far our biggest sponsor.
Tim O'Reilly will give the opening keynote, and Richard Thieme will
give the closing one. The keynote on the middle day is available for
a sponsor; if no sponsor takes it, I don't know who we'll have give
it.
We have 73.5 hours of conference content planned, in four simultaneous
streams. The tutorials add another 24 hours of content. We have 57
confirmed speakers (including tutorial instructors).
There are some plans in train to do some sort of cross-marketing with
COMDEX, in Las Vegas at the same time we are. Security is handling
this.
There have been some timeliness and communication issues with Security
Travel. Sally Khudairi is working for Security now, and has taken
over responsibility for exhibit and sponsor operations. The situation
is much improved as a consequence.
Our contract with Security protects us from financial liability of any
sort, and Security has expressed willingness to take a loss for Las
Vegas in order to grow the conference. Of course, neither Security
nor the concom *want* ApacheCon to bleed red ink, so all ASF members
have been requested to get the word out and flog potential attendees
out of the woodwork. The co-location with COMDEX was designed to help
offset the 'no travel' policies that have become endemic. Acceptable
means of contacting contributors to make the same request of them is
requested, since Brian has such a horror of *any* mail ever being sent
to committers@ <grin>.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment B:
There is no Attachment B
-----------------------------------------
Attachment C: Status Report for the PHP Project
PHP
The [1]PHP project is alive and well. As with any large and popular
project there is plenty drama on a day-to-day basis, but in the end
we are building a useful tool used by a lot of people.
Roughly 9 million or 26% (up from 24% in May) of all public web
domains found by [2]Netcraft last month have PHP installed on them.
This of course includes many domains that may not use PHP, but it
doesn't include any non-Apache module PHP installations, of which
there are plenty.
According to [3]SecuritySpace.com about 38% (down from 45% in May)
of all Apache servers have the PHP module activated.
The PHP PMC, better known as the PHP Group consists of: Thies C.
Arntzen, Stig Bakken, Shane Caraveo, Andi Gutmans, Rasmus Lerdorf,
Sam Ruby, Sascha Schumann, Zeev Suraski, Jim Winstead, and Andrei
Zmievski.
Releases
The current stable released version is 4.2.3 with hopefully the
next release being 4.3 in the next 6-8 weeks and a PHP 5.0 sometime
in mid 2003. Since the previous report in May versions 4.2.2 and
4.2.3 were released on July 22 and September 6 respectively.
Sub-Projects
Within the PHP project there are a number of sub-projects.
* PHP
* PHP Documentation
* PHP Quality Assurance
* PEAR - PHP Extension and Application Repository
* Smarty - Templating system
* PHP-GTK
Committers
There are 651 People with CVS accounts on [4]cvs.php.net. Because
of the large number we do not give out real system accounts but
instead rely on pserver and CVS access control.
Rough CVS Access Breakdown
10 users have access to everything.
97 have access to all PHP source and Documentation.
372 people only have access to the Documentation.
90 people have access to PEAR and the PEAR Documentation.
35 people have access to the PHP website files.
3 people have access to PHP-GTK sub-project source+docs.
12 people have access to PHP-GTK sub-project docs.
2 people have access to the Smarty sub-project code+docs.
4 people have access to the Smarty sub-project docs.
Mailing Lists
PHP has quite a few mailing lists, both run by us at php.net and
many others elsewhere. These are available via both http and nntp
from news.php.net and we have found more and more people use these
alternative means to participate due to the ever-growing traffic.
The subscriber breakdown is:
php-announce 4832
php-general 1701
php-dev 622
phpdoc 248
php-qa 150
pear-general 513
pear-dev 303
smarty-general 440
smarty-dev 94
php-gtk-general 276
php-gtk-dev 97
Infrastructure
The main PHP web site gets hit pretty hard. 2-3 million hits per
day from between 70 and 80 thousand unique visitors. This
translates to somewhere between 6 to 8 Mbps sustained bandwidth
usage. We have had to move the main site lately and it is now on a
machine hosted and donated by RackShack. We are trying to entice
more people into using some of the 94 mirrors we have around the
world. The machines that make up the main php.net infrastructure
are:
* rs1.php.net hosted by RackShack (p3/1GHz, 1GB RAM 40GB HD, redhat
7.2) handles main www.php.net site
* va1.php.net hosted by VA Software (dual p3/650, 1 GB RAM, 130GB
HD, debian-stable) handles rsync.php.net and snaps.php.net
* rack1.php.net hosted by Rackspace (dual p3/650, 1GB RAM, 33GB HD,
redhat 7.3) handles mx duties, master.php.net, bugs.php.net,
gtk.php.net and smarty.php.net
* pair1.php.net hosted by Pair Networks (dual p3/1000 xeon, 512MB
RAM, 27GB HD, freebsd 4.6) handles mailing lists, cvs, nntp and
pear.php.net
* pair2.php.net hosted by Pair Networks (p3/566, 128MB RAM, 27GB HD,
freebsd 4.6) is a luke-warm-swap backup for pair1
Conferences
There are 2 major PHP events coming up. First, [5]PHPCON2002 in
Millbrae (Near San Jose) on Oct. 24,25 and then [6]The
International PHP Conference Nov. 3-6 in Frankfurt. PHP will also
have a small presence at Apachecon in Las Vegas in November.
Apache 2.0 Support/Issues (hasn't really changed from the May report)
Aaron Bannert and Justin Erenkrantz have worked hard in the past on
improving Apache 2.0 support. It sort of works in 4.2.x but should
be better in 4.3. We still have a huge problem with thread safety
issues in 3rd-party libraries. PHP itself is threadsafe and
re-entrant, but a number of 3rd party libraries that are commonly
linked into PHP are not and many more we simply don't know how well
they will work in a threaded environment. This will slow the
adoption of Apache 2.0 combined with PHP significantly. There is
also a certain lack of motivation when it comes to Apache 2.0
because the perception is that the improvements vs. headaches ratio
is not very good. If the perchild mpm ever became useful, you would
see a big push from the PHP community towards Apache 2, but right
now there is a bit of a ho-hum attitude.
Trademark Issues
Like the Apache project, we occasionally have some issues with
commercial entities using "PHP" in their name and other than asking
them nicely to not do that, we aren't sure how to handle it. For
some reason, hundreds of non-commercial projects use "PHP" in their
project name as well which we have been trying hard to discourage.
To that end we have tried to clarify this somewhat in the [7]PHP
license. Not sure what the status of the new project-agnostic
Apache license is, but we would likely move to that if it fits us
and addresses this point in a clear manner.
References
1. http://www.php.net/
2. http://www.netcraft.com/
3. http://www.securityspace.com/
4. http://cvs.php.net/
5. http://www.php-con.com/
6. http://www.php-conference.de/2002/index_en.php
7. http://www.php.net/license/3_0.txt
-----------------------------------------
Attachment D: Status Report for the TCL Project
> I'm not asking for page upon page. Really, it seems like a simple
> paragraph or two would be enough. Things like:
> * what code releases have been made? [since the last report]
We successfully released Websh 3.5, although the response was somewhat
less than had been desired. Particularly dismaying was that news
outlets largely ignored it. Slashdot wouldn't even publish it in
their Apache section. This was frustrating because we spent time
creating a nice, professional looking press release. Maybe the lesson
is that the free software news sites respond better to something a
little less modeled after the commercial world.
> * any legal issues to bring to the board?
> * any cross-project issues that need to be addressed?
> * any problems with committers, members, etc?
> * plans and expectations for the next period?
We are slowly and surely working along our informal roadmap. The near
term goal is to release an alpha version of Apache Rivet, which we
should have within a month. Next comes a stable version of Rivet, and
the transition from mod_dtcl and NeoWebScript to Rivet, and the
gradual retiring of those projects. That will bring us down to a more
manageable 3 projects, all with reasonably different design goals.
Long term, the desire is to further break these down into
interchangeable components, in order to be able to combine them as
much as possible.
> * etc (your own thoughts on what is important would be helpful!)
I am more or less happy with the state of things. Development has
been a bit slower as of late because of economic considerations (full
time day jobs) for key contributors.
> This is obviously a new "requirement" that I'm requesting. If it
> doesn't seem right, then let's discuss. I've got some feelings for
> what a PMC report should be (per above), but *you* guys are the PMC
> chairs... what ideas do you have for an *effective* report to the
> board?
I'm happy to report what's up, as long as it's not too frequent, and
remains fairly informal, as above. I think it's actually a good idea,
as it would most likely help to keep the ASF more tighly knitted.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment E: Status Report for the XML Project
* what code releases have been made? [since 8/1/2002]
Axis 1.0RC1
Batik 1.5beta4
XML Security 1.06D2
Xalan-J 2.40
Xerces-C 2.1.0
Xereces-J 2.1.0
* any legal issues to bring to the board?
none
* any cross-project issues that need to be addressed?
The xml.apache.org website is in need of major improvement.
* any problems with committers, members, etc?
none that I am aware of
* plans and expectations for the next period?
I hope that ApacheCon will provide a venue for many xml.apache.org
people to get together in person.
* etc (your own thoughts on what is important would be helpful!)
-----------------------------------------
Attachment F: Status Report for the APR Project
The APR project has continued to make progress over the last year. We are
nearing our first release, and we are working to get our release process
correct. Our source code base is growing, and since the last STATUS
report, we have added apr-serf, a portable HTTP-client library.
There are a couple of important votes underway in the PMC. First, we are
electing a new PMC Chair, although I have volunteered to remain in the
position until a new is elected. Also, we are currently in the process of
redefining our mission statement. There are a number of opinions about
what our goals should be, and we are trying to come to consensus now.
Recently, we had a bit of a shake-up with the El-Kabong donation from
Covalent. We have decided to respect Jon Travis' wishes and not use the
code.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment G: Status Report for HTTP Server Project
To the best of my knowledge all activities within the HTTPD PMC are well
within the scope of the foundation's mission. The project seems to be
thriving. When asked no member of the PMC reported any issues they
desired brought to the board's attention. The pool of volunteers and
employees of contributing firms remains substantial. The diverse goals
and expertise of the parties involved continue to be more complementary
than competitive. Our disputes remain well within the ablitity of our
mutual respect to resolve. That allows us the luxury of continuing to
take advantage of a casual peer-to-peer goverance framework. That said,
there is a suspision that a more something procedural or at minimum
fastidious might be helpful - that awaits volunteers. Internally the
project has three notably active arenas (1.3, 2.0 and doc). Doc is
wonderful, in particular it is both active and has drawn in additonal
commiters. 2.0 is making slow but steady progress reguarding market
adoption. I personally would love to see more end-users/web-master
contributions. Some of the critical complementary products - PHP in
particular - are having a rough time achieving the same level of synergy
that they have with 1.3. 2.0 is dependent on the APR project which at
this time lacks a formal release. 1.3 endures. There is some slight
tension from time to time about how 1.3 'competes' with 2.0 and if that
requires some action - opinions differ.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment H: Status Report for Jakarta Project
__________________________________________________________
End of minutes for the 18 Sep 2002 board meeting.
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