Index Links: 2003 - All years - Original
                    The Apache Software Foundation

                  Board of Directors Meeting Minutes

                             May 21, 2003


1. Call to order

    The meeting was scheduled for 10am PDT -0700. A quorum was
    recognized by the chairman at 10:06.  The meeting was held by
    teleconference hosted by Ben Hyde and Intuit:
    
    IRC #apacheboard on irc.freenode.net was used for backup
    purposes.

2. Roll Call

    Directors Present:

        Brian Behlendorf
        Roy T. Fielding
        Jim Jagielski
        Ben Laurie
        Greg Stein
        Bill Stoddard

    Directors Absent:

        Ken Coar
        Dirk-Willem van Gulik
        Sam Ruby

    Guests:

        Chuck Murcko

3. Minutes and supplements from previous meetings
 
    A. The meeting of January 22, 2003

       board_minutes_2003_01_22.txt in cvs.apache.org:/home/cvs board
       were approved by general consent.
 
    B. The meeting of February 19, 2003

       Minutes are not available for approval. [Sam Ruby]
 
    C. The meeting of February 26, 2003

       Minutes are not available for approval. [Sam Ruby]
 
    D. The meeting of March 19, 2003

       board_minutes_2003_03_19.txt in cvs.apache.org:/home/cvs board
       were approved by general consent.
 
    E. The meeting of April 16, 2003

       Minutes were not available for approval. [Jim Jagielski]
 
4. Officer Reports
 
    A. Chairman [Greg]
       Greg reported that he was pleased with the state of the ASF.
       The PMCs have been taking a very active role in managing
       their respective projects, while at the same time
       fostering a healthy development environment.
    
    B. President [Dirk]
       No report.
    
    C. Treasurer [Chuck]
       Chuck reported that the ASF general business account had
       a balance of $102,595.57, with $233.72 in checking and
       $1746.15 under PayPal.
    
    D. Exec. V.P. and Secretary [Jim]
       Jim reported that he has purchased a new FAX machine for the
       ASF. This is a "multipurpose" machine, that does printing,
       FAXing and scanning. Now that the new FAX machine is online,
       signed CLAs are, once again, being received and filed.

5. Committee Reports

    A. Apache Ant Project [Conor MacNeill]
    
       See Attachment A
       
       By General Consent, the Apache Ant Project report
       was accepted and entered.

    B. Apache HTTP Server Project [Ben Hyde]
    
       See Attachment B

       By General Consent, the Apache HTTP Server Project report
       was accepted and entered.

       There was some discussion on the viability and legality
       of the HTTP Server Project "bundling" SSL/encryption
       code.  It was noted that a legal opinion was obtained by
       the ASF regarding this.  The overview of the opinion will
       be scanned and committed into CVS.
       
    C. Apache Perl Project [Doug MacEachern]
    
       See Attachment C

       By General Consent, the Apache Perl Project report
       was accepted and entered.

    D. Apache XML Project [Ted Leung]
    
       See Attachment D

       By General Consent, the Apache XML Project report
       was accepted and entered.

    E. Fund Raising Committee [Chuck Murcko]
    
       See Attachment E

       By General Consent, the Fund Raising Committee report
       was accepted and entered.

    F. Infrastructure (President's) Committee
    
       See Attachment F

       By General Consent, the Apache Ant Project report
       was accepted and entered.

    G. Apache Cocoon Project [Steven Noels]

       See Attachment G

       By General Consent, the Infrastructure report
       was accepted and entered.

    H. Apache Tcl Project [David N. Welton]

       See Attachment H

       By General Consent, the Apache Tcl Project report
       was accepted and entered.
       
       It was noted that there was some concern that the Tcl
       project had a very small number of committers, and that
       growth of the project should be encouraged.

6. Special Orders

    A. Set date for annual members meeting and board elections
    
       [ See sections 3.2, 3.4, and 5.5 of the Bylaws. We need to give
         10-60 days notice, and have this meeting within 13 months of
         May 21, 2002 (the last annual meeting) ]

       The date of the Annual ASF Members meeting was set for June 18th,
       2003 to be help via IRC.  Jim was to create a channel for
       the meeting, on the irc.freenode.net system.  Proposed time
       is 1:00pm, Eastern time.

    B. New Vice President for the Apache Cocoon PMC

       Resolution R1:
       WHEREAS, the membership of the Apache Cocoon Project Management
       Committee (PMC) have nominated Steven Noels to serve as
       chairman of the Apache Cocoon PMC; and

       WHEREAS, the previously appointed chairman of the Apache Cocoon
       PMC, Stefano Mazzocchi, has resigned his position as Vice
       President, Apache Cocoon, in favor of Steven Noels' appointment
       to that position.

       NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that Steven Noels be and hereby
       is appointed to the office of Vice President, Apache Cocoon, to
       serve in accordance with and subject to the direction of the
       Board of Directors and the Bylaws of the Foundation until
       death, resignation, retirement, removal or disqualification, or
       until a successor is appointed.

       By unanimous vote, Resolution R1 was approved.

    C. Slightly modify the contributor agreement

       Bill Stoddard asked: "I would like to add this item to the
       board meeting agenda. I propose the following amendment to 
       the CLA to add the phrase (all caps) as follows:"

        4. You represent that, except as disclosed in your Contribution
           submission(s), each of your Contributions is your original creation.
           You represent that your Contribution submission(s) include complete
           details of any license or other restriction (including, but not
           limited to, related patents and trademarks) 
        
           OF WHICH YOU PERSONALLY ARE AWARE AND WHICH ARE 
        
           associated with any part
           of your Contribution(s) (including a copy of any applicable license
           agreement).  You agree to notify the Foundation of any facts or
           circumstances of which you become aware that would make Your
           representations in this Agreement inaccurate in any respect.

       This item was tabled in order to allow us to get a
       formal legal opinion regarding the effects of the change.
       Ben Laurie is tasked to contact Robyn regarding this item.

    D. Granting Peter Donald fulls rights / copyright to the "Naming"
       and "Converter" codebases within Avalon.

       The result of this discussion was that the ASF should
       wait for an exact request from Peter Donald regarding both
       the grant of copyright and grant of distribution.  Until we
       know the exact items that Mr. Donald is requesting, it is
       premature to make any decisions or agreements.

    E. HP's use of "The Secure Apache Web Server for Linux" (posted to
       board@ by Sander Striker)
       Message-ID: <JLEGKKNELMHCJPNMOKHOMEFCJNAA.striker@apache.org>
       
       Dirk was tasked with sending the "normal letter" regarding
       the use of the 'Apache' name under ASF guidelines.

    F. JavaWorld awards
       
    
7. Unfinished Business

8. New Business

    A. Credit card to associate with PayPal.
    
       It was noted that having a credit card associated with our
       PayPal account results in better rates for us.  The ASF does
       not have such a card, however.  Chuck was tasked with
       determining the best course of action to resolve this,
       whether it means using a "personal" card for the association
       or whether the ASF can and should obtain such a card.  It
       was noted that having one would be quite beneficial.

9. Announcements

    There were no announcements.
    
10. Adjournment

    Scheduled to adjourn by 11:00 PDT -0800.  Adjourned at
    11:13.


============
ATTACHMENTS:
============

-----------------------------------------
Attachment A: Status report for the Apache Ant Project

o Ant 1.5.2

Ant 1.5.2 was released on March 3, 2003

The zip refactoring that was undertaken to eliminate a number of
zip/jar update bugs introduced a regression whereby some elements of
the produced Zips could not be viewed by WinZIP. This required a
followup 1.5.3 release.

o Ant 1.5.3

Ant 1.5.3 was released on April 9, 2003.

Ant 1.5.3 addresses over 100 bug reports from Ant 1.5.1. It has proved
to be a stable release so far. As I stated previously there is not
expected to be any further Ant 1.5.x releases.

o Ant 1.6

Ant 1.6 is the current development codebase (CVS head). No release
plan has been considered for this release. Previously I had expected
this to be released around June but now I think this is more likely to
be later in the year, say August 2003.

Features which are candidates for this release remain:

* Some form of task library support, allowing third-party tasks to be
  more easily packaged, distributed and integrated with Ant.

* Support for polymorphic types

* Delayed Task construction, Top levels tasks, etc

Much development work and significant change in the Ant core has
already been committed (namespace support, top-level tasks, plugin
capability for property resolution, component creation, etc)

o JDK 1.1 support

The Ant project has voted to drop the requirement for JDK 1.1 support
in the Ant core from 1.6 onwards. This change has been canvassed in
the user community and strongly signalled in the Ant 1.5.3 release
notes and download pages. The change was strongly supported. It will
eliminate the need for messy reflection-based workarounds that had
been necessary previously.

o ant.apache.org site

Since the previous report, the Ant site is now live and the former
site under Jakarta redirected.

o Bylaws

The current bylaws proposal,
http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/ant/proposal/ant-site/
is being voted upon by the PMC now. If accepted, the board will be
asked to approve the bylaws. We'd be happy to work towards a single
Apache-wide project bylaws proposal, if required.

o Legal Issues

A request has been received from Peter Donald for the assignment of
copyright in the Myrmidon codebase. The PMC has voiced no objections
to the assignment in principle but I have requested clarification of
which code is affected. No response has been received to date.

o Outstanding bugs and patches

The number of outstanding bugs against Ant has stabilised over the
last three months. i.e. the arrival rate generally equals the cleanup
rate. There remains, however, a large bug backlog. Two committers have
been added to the Ant project which may help in this area.

o New committers

Two new commiters have been added, Jesse Stockall and Antoine
Levy-Lambert.  They have shown a long-standing commitment to
addressing issues in Ant. Also they willhelp us cover more of the
optional Ant tasks.

o Community

The dev list has been very active discussing the requirements and
implementation of antlibs, the consequences for dynamic typing and
polymorphism in Ant. The disccusion has addressed issues such as XML
namespace usage and its relation to antlibs, etc. I think some
consensus is emerging.

While active, the discussion has not been heated and the community
appears healthy. Likewise the user list is very active and healthy.


-----------------------------------------
Attachment B: Status report for the Apache HTTP Server Project

To the best of my knowledge all activities with the HTTPD PMC are
well within the scope of the foundation's mission.

The PMC's membership was revised with a number of idle members
deciding to go emeritus (Alexei K., Aram M., Brian B., Cliff S.,
Daniel L. R., Paul S.) and some new members brought on board.

The new processes for managing security issues working well.  This is
a nice improvement.  Discussions of possible changes to how we
announce security releases cam up again.  The desire is to provide
some early warning.  It appears that discussion is leaning toward
concluding that a no-change is the best course, but time time will
tell.

The perenial topic of bundling SSL support sprouted up again.  A
number of PMC members, I included, sense that if we could frame it
exactly right we could now bundle.  Reading the export regs is an art.
We are not qualified to make definitive judgements.  Getting the right
kind of lawyer involved is probably inevitable.  Asking that lawyer
the right questions demands we get our house in order first.  So, at
the present time we haven't managed to frame this question in a way
that allows us to suggest to the board what action we would like to
take.

While some progress was made toward getting committer agrements signed
by all current committers more work is needed.  I suspect, but we
have yet to debate this, that in due course we will decide to revoke
commit rights and PMC membership in service of cleaning this up.

Overall things are good in HTTP Server land.


-----------------------------------------
Attachment C: Status report for the Apache Perl Project

* mod_perl-1.99_09 has been released

* Apache::Test, the library portion of the httpd-test perl-framework
  has been released to CPAN.

* New committers:
 - Philippe M. Chiasson
 - Randy Kobes

* the number of support questions related to the 2.0 version continue
  to grow at a steady rate along with reports of using it in
  production. Some reports suggest a much better performance thatn
  mod_perl 1.0.

* The mod_perl-1.0 generation (mod_perl-1.27) just works. No problems
  reported.


-----------------------------------------
Attachment D: Status report for the Apache XML Project

-- PMC

No one from Batik wants to be on the PMC

We need to finish revisions to the XML charter and elect a new PMC chair

-- Axkit

Work has begun on a port to Apache 2.0. This is going well, and is
down to the niggly details.

-- Batik

Batik 1.5beta 5 was released on March 23, 2003.

-- Commons

Unfortunately there hasn't been much release work in Commons, although
we could use a tagged and verified release of each of the
components. I was hoping to get the subsetted documentation
forrestized first but haven't had any time to work on it.

Resolver has had several bugfixes, since no-one has complained with
more problems we could definitely use a point release of this
component.

We have had some participation on the mailing list, including
J.Pietschmann <j3322ptm@yahoo.de>'s proposed XInclude processor, which
generated some good discussion with Xerces-folk and Cocoon-folk
alike. We haven't had the critical mass yet to make the final
decision, partly because we're trying to figure the proper home and
usage for such a tool.

One status question we should start to ask each project is also their
status on getting mirrorable dists setup a'la Jakarta land; this is
something we should be more organized about getting moving so we can
better use the mirrors and save bandwidth.

-- FOP

No releases since last quarterly report. Release Candidate 3 of 0.20.5
is due in the next few days. This will be the last RC before the final
0.20.5 release which will also conclude the development (only
bugfixing ATM) on the maintenance branch. All development after that
will continue in HEAD (redesign). Progress in HEAD is slow.

License issues with hyphenation pattern files are still pending. A
test run for the whole license clean-up process where an author of an
original hyphenation pattern file faxed in a grant document is still
pending confirmation of grant receipt. Jeremias Maerki has pinged Jim
Jagielski twice but got no response. Status of this process is here:
http://nagoya.apache.org/wiki/apachewiki.cgi?FOPAudits/March2003

-- Forrest

-- Xalan-C ++

Xalan-C++ 1.5 was released on April 29.

-- Xalan-J/XSLTC

The XSLTC_DTM branch has been merged with the HEAD branch along with
updated serializer code now used by both Xalan-J and XSLTC. These
changes were released in Xalan-J/XSLTC 2.5.0 on April 14.

The Xalan-J/XSLTC community is also happy to welcome three new
committers: Lionel Villard, Arun Yadav and Brian Minchau!

-- Xerces-C++

Xercesc2.3 is to be released on May 23, 2003 (as scheduled), which has
these features (listed below) implemented:

     XML 1.1
     Namespace in XML1.1
     More DOM L3
     Schema 1.0 Errata
     Pluggable Memory Manager
     Pluggable Security Manager
     Pluggable PanicHandler?
     Logical Path Resolution

-- Xerces-J

The last release of Xerces-J was 2.4.0, which emerged on March 27. We
have had one person nominated for committer status in the last
quarter, but, so far at least, that has only garnered two +1's (no
-1's) so is stalled. There have been no recent major technical
discussions in the community.

-- Xerces-P

-- Xindice

No release since last quarter report: code is almost ready and stable,
but documentation is missing and time from developers is quite short
ATM. Anyway, the 1.1 release is expected sometime soon. No new
committers were nominated during this timeframe, though someone has
recently stepped up on the ML to volunteer in helping the Xindice
team. Notable accomplishments during this period have been Gump
integration and some work on unit tests.

-- XML-Security

The XML-Security project has released beta 0.2 of the C++ library,
implementing XML Digital Signature support and is close to releasing a
stable 1.00. Continuing work revolves around minor bug fixing and
implementing a few remaining elements within the standard. From there,
implementation will move to the XML Encryption standard.

The Java library now has a beta implementation of the XML Encryption
standard, and work continues in making this stable and ready for
public release.


-----------------------------------------
Attachment E: Status report for the Fund Raising Committee

[from Chuck Murcko]

Fundraising committee has not been very active in the last several months,
on its mailing list. We have received a total of 1746.15 to our PayPal account
since it opened, the majority of which is a contribution from USC.

-----------------------------------------
Attachment F: Status report for the Infrastructure (President's) Committee

[ from Brian Behlendorf ]

Major efforts:

New ASF server was paid for by ASF check and picked up by Brian.  Brian to
  set up an in-person meeting for the local ops team to check out the box,
  learn how the RAID works, etc.  To be scheduled for some time next week
  most likely.

The colocation agreement with United Layer was signed.  I'll send a copy
  to Jim for our records.  We can move in any time, billing starts a few
  weeks after we move in our first box.  First move might happen this week
  if I get my act together (Brian speaking).


Other work done by the team:

Created 22 accounts: jesse, antoine, andreas, alexmcl, egli, gregor,
  michi, edith, felix, liyanage, memo, thorsten, minchau, sterling,
  psmith, sdeboy, brudav, michal, cchew, yoavs, funkman, joerg
Removed 1 account: mehran
Updated the account creation template in the infrastructure repository,
  actfrmtmpl.txt
Dealt with a couple out-of-disk-space situations
Dealt with some runaway robots
Discussed whether to change the commit-mailer to only send viewcvs URLs
  if the commit message would otherwise be too big.
Updated the Subversion installation on icarus
Fixed a content-encoding issue on the web server, and turned off SSI
Updated search.apache.org


Also of note:

A demo of SourceCast for apache.org has been set up, and I've shared
  access to it for a few folks.  Most of them are busy, though, so if
  others would like to give it a try, write me privately.  I'll be putting
  together a true plan for ASF evaluation over time, this is just an
  initial kick-the-tires kind of thing.


-----------------------------------------
Attachment G: Status report for the Apache Cocoon Project

As requested, here's the report on Cocoon's state of affairs,
essentially since it has become a toplevel-status project, in no
particular order. I do hope it gives the board a feel on how we are going.

1) Stefano resigned as a PMC Chair, and was succeeded by Steven Noels. A
separate message in this regard has been filed with the Board already.

2) This marked somehow a transition towards a better separation between
technical leadership and the more administrative/political function of a
PMC Chair, which was one of the reasons Stefano decided to step down.
The sense of liberation afterwards was tangible and enjoyed by all.

3) Clean-up of the Cocoon PMC Memberlist. The committee-info.txt now
reflects the current composition of the Cocoon PMC quite faithfully, and
new committers have been polled about their willingness to join. The
policy that all committers are also PMC member, if they want to, still
stands ATM. New or updated PMC members since lately are: Bruno Dumon,
Geoff Howard, Ivelin Ivanov, Andrew Savory and Michael Wechner, who
joins in from our incubating Lenya subproject. Pier and Sam are on our
list as well.

4) The issue with the recursive Cocoon charter still stands and will be
addressed shortly.

5) The use of the Cocoon name in the cocoondev.org and cocooncenter.com
domain names, both offering Cocoon community resources, which had been
brought forward as something the PMC should endorse by Stefano while he
was Chair, has not been endorsed yet. We will discuss whether this is
still needed and decide/report later on.

6) Related, we still need to discuss whether content being added to the
Wiki can effectively be considered similar to code contributions, where
a CLA is required, and code becomes (c) ASF. TBD.

7) There are some emotions concerning the move of a form handling
library outside Apache CVS, hosted now on Sourceforge under
http://www.xmlform.org/ - this might result in an oversight or community
problem. The Cocoon community is aware of this issue, discussion is ongoing.

8) Discussion was held to transfer some code from Cocoon -> POI. No
issues to be foreseen, no action taken yet.

9) There was some discussion about components quite central to Cocoon
who are managed inside Avalon Excalibur (for reuse by other projects).
The general direction is that Cocoon committers will be granted commit
access to the respective Avalon CVS module upon demand, or by default.
No conclusion as of now.

10) We opted for a Milestone release scheme until 2.1 is considered
final, to get out of the longtime stall in releasing 2.1. So far, two
milestone releases has been done. Mirroring support has been activated
for our website and is in active use.

11) Lenya arrived as an incubating project, and the subsequent
infrastructure request have been taken care of by the Infrastructure
team in a very timely fashion - kudos. Lenya itself has a fair amount of
traffic on its lists - and has not required any intervention of sorts
from our side.

12) We also started moving our web and internal URI naming scheme
towards reflecting our toplevel status, i.e. http://cocoon.apache.org/
for our external web presence, and http://apache.org/cocoon/ for
internal (namespace) URIs.

13) Our external web presence is in the process of being refactored.

14) Stable Gump runs for Cocoon are (finally) operational and helpful.


-----------------------------------------
Attachment H: Status report for the Apache Tcl Project

Status
======

The Apache Tcl projects haven't been very active as of late, but
this doesn't mean they aren't being taken care of, just a bit
dormant.  I have had hands full with moving, and I know one of the
other PMC members has as well.

We managed to get some very nice, professional looking logos created
for both the Apache Tcl project as a whole, as well as Rivet.

Personally, I'm a little bit dissappointed that we weren't able to
generate some interest in the Tcl comunity for the ASF as a potential
place for projects.  I spent some time talking to people in order to
generate interest, but not much has come of it.  I suspect the Tcl
community sees the ASF as a 'web thing'.

Plans
=====

For the immediate future, we are going to remove NWS and mod_dtcl from
the front page on the web site, in order to concentrate more on
current projects - namely Rivet, which takes the place of the two
aforementioned code bases.  This consolidation should help out our
image some, providing fewer options on our main page.

With libapreq-2 taking shape, this will be a positive factor for both
a potential Rivet apache2 port, as well as possibly provide some
useful code for mod_tcl.


-----------------------------------------
Attachment I: Contributor License Agreement, version 3


                  The Apache Software Foundation

                   Contributor License Agreement


Thank you for your interest in The Apache Software Foundation (the
"Foundation").  In order to clarify the intellectual property license
granted with contributions of software from any person or entity
(the "Contributor"), the Foundation would like to have a Contributor
License Agreement on file that has been signed by the Contributor,
indicating agreement to the license terms below.  This license is for
your protection as a Contributor of software to the Foundation and does
not change your right to use your own contributions for any other purpose.

If you have not already done so, please complete this Agreement and
send it by facsimile to the Foundation at +1-410-803-2258, or send a
photocopy by regular mail to The Apache Software Foundation,
1901 Munsey Drive, Forest Hill, MD 21050-2747, U.S.A.  Please read this
document carefully before signing and keep the original for your records.


  Full name: ____________________________  E-Mail:    ___________________

  Mailing Address: ______________________  Telephone: ___________________

  _______________________________________  Facsimile: ___________________

  _______________________________________  Country:   ___________________


You and the Foundation hereby accept and agree to the following terms
and conditions:

1. Your "Contributions" means all of your past, present and future
   contributions of object code, source code and documentation to the
   Foundation, however submitted to the Foundation, excluding any
   submissions that are conspicuously marked or otherwise designated in
   writing by You as "Not a Contribution."

2. You hereby grant to the Foundation a non-exclusive, irrevocable,
   worldwide, no-charge, transferable copyright license to use,
   execute, prepare derivative works of, and distribute (internally
   and externally, in object code and, if included in your
   Contributions, source code form) your Contributions.  Except for the
   rights granted to the Foundation in this paragraph, You reserve all
   right, title and interest in and to your Contributions.

3. You represent that you are legally entitled to grant the above
   license.  If your employer(s) have rights to intellectual property
   that you create, you represent that you have received permission
   to make the Contributions on behalf of that employer, or that your
   employer has waived such rights for your Contributions to the
   Foundation.

4. You represent that, except as disclosed in your Contribution
   submission(s), each of your Contributions is your original creation.
   You represent that your Contribution submission(s) include complete
   details of any license or other restriction (including, but not
   limited to, related patents and trademarks) of which you personally
   are aware and which are associated with any part of your
   Contribution(s) (including a copy of any applicable license agreement).
   You agree to notify the Foundation of any facts or circumstances of
   which you become aware that would make Your representations in this
   Agreement inaccurate in any respect.

5. You are not expected to provide support for your Contributions,
   except to the extent you desire to provide support.  You may provide
   support for free, for a fee, or not at all.  Your Contributions are
   provided as-is, with all faults defects and errors, and without
   warranty of any kind (either express or implied) including, without
   limitation, any implied warranty of merchantability and fitness for
   a particular purpose and any warranty of non-infringement.


Please sign: __________________________________ Date: ________________


__________________________________________________________
End of minutes for the 21 May 2003 board meeting.

Index