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