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The Apache Software Foundation
Board of Directors Meeting Minutes
January 21, 2004
1. Call to order
The meeting was scheduled for 10:00 PST -0800 and was begun at 10:05
when a sufficient attendance to constitute a quorum was recognized by
the chairman. The meeting was held teleconference, hosted by Jim
Jagielski and Covalent.
IRC #asfboard on irc.freenode.net was used for backup purposes.
2. Roll Call
Directors Present:
Mark Cox
Jim Jagielski
Ben Laurie
Sam Ruby
Greg Stein
Directors Absent:
Brian Behlendorf
Ken Coar
Dirk-Willem van Gulik
Guests:
Chuck Murcko (Treasurer)
3. Minutes and supplements from previous meetings
A. The meeting of February 26, 2003
CVS - board:/board_minutes_2003_02_26.txt
Approved by general consent.
B. The meeting of November 16, 2003
Minutes are not yet available for approval. [Brian Behlendorf]
C. The meeting of December 17, 2003
CVS - board:/board_minutes_2003_12_17.txt
Approved by general consent
4. Officer Reports
A. Chairman [Greg]
Activity has been relatively low over the past month, mostly
due to the holidays. Things have started to pick up again.
Looking back to our September meeting, we noted the Incubator
had a "low energy level". Today, the Incubator is one of the
most active projects at the ASF.
From a legal standpoint, things have been relatively quiet.
Organizationally, we have a couple PMCs who wish to change
their Chairs, but otherwise things seem to be quiet.
B. President [Dirk]
No report.
C. Treasurer [Chuck]
December and 2003 FY financial reports are now in
foundation/Funds. We've seen a healthy upswing in contributions,
partly because of the appeal by fundraising committee to members,
and partly as a result of year-end contributions by check. ASF
total assets have increased by approximately $6k since 12/15,
reversing the gradual downward trend seen since mid-2003 (when we
started using the UL colo). A large part of this is due to a $5k
contribution by craigslist.org.
I have contacted Arman at UL about getting our monthly colo
payment into electronic form. This won't happen until at least
February.
Support for Quickbooks Pro 2002 - ASF's accounting software -
will be ending this coming April. We may wish to consider
replacing this with an updated Intuit product.
Current balances (as of 01/21/2004):
Paypal $2527.98
Checking $250.75
Premium Mkt. $103258.72
D. Exec. V.P. and Secretary [Jim]
We are seeing a steady flow of incoming CLAs. One
"burst" was after v3 of the CLA (and the corresponding
Corporate CLA) was approved for use, when a number
of IBM committers sent in a signed CLA. I have also
created a 'grants.txt' file in the foundation CVS which
will list the Software/License Grants we have on
file (ala 'clas.txt').
I was investigating the idea of the ASF obtaining their
own conferencing account. An offering from MCI/Worldcom
actually looked promising, since it was a "pay as you go"
system with good pricing. Upon further investigation,
their support for "overseas" calls was not good: they did
not have an Internation toll-free line, instead requiring
the operator to "dial up" an Internation participant.
We will continue to use the current scenario. PMCs that
require conferencing capability should contact me.
It was noted at this time that the present system does
not provide International toll-free and that the MCI
system may, in fact, be on-par with what we are
currently using. Because of this, Jim will "reboot"
the process of investigating and obtaining this service.
5. Special Orders
A. Appoint a new Director to fill Roy's vacated position
Nominees:
- Noel J. Bergman
- Sander Striker
By majority vote, Sander was appointed to the ASF Board of
Directors position.
B. Appoint a new Jakarta PMC Chair
This was postponed until the February BoD meeting.
C. Appoint a new Avalon PMC Chair
WHEREAS, the membership of the Apache Avalon Project Management
Committee (PMC) have recommended J. Aaron Farr to serve as
chairman of the Apache Avalon PMC; and
WHEREAS, the previously appointed chairman of the Apache Avalon
PMC, Berin Loritsch, has stepped down from his position as Vice
President, Apache Avalon, in favor of J. Aaron Farr's appointment
to that position.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that J. Aaron Farr be and hereby
is appointed to the office of Vice President, Apache Avalon, 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."
There was some discussion regarding the health of the Avalon
PMC and the energy and spirit within the PMC. It was hoped that
the recent changes within the PMC will continue what many see
as a revitalization of the PMC.
By Unanimous Vote, J. Aaron Farr was appointed Avalon PMC
Chair.
D. Approve the new Apache License 2.0
WHEREAS, the foundation membership has expressed a strong
desire for an update to the license under which Apache software
is released,
WHEREAS, proposed text for the new license has been reworked
and refined for many, many months, based on feedback from the
membership and other parties outside the ASF,
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the proposed license found
at http://www.apache.org/licenses/proposed/LICENSE-2.0.txt is
officially named the Apache Software License 2.0. To grant a
sufficient transition time, this license is to be used for all
software releases from the Foundation after the date of March
1st, 2004.
By Unanimous Vote, the new Apache License 2.0 was approved.
E. Approve a Response regarding the alleged JBoss IP infringment in
Geronimo.
After the receipt of the letter from JBoss's lawyers regarding
alleged IP infringment in the Geronimo codebase (and thus
non-compliance with (L)GPL, the Incubator team and the Geronimo
development team performed an exhaustive review of not only
the specific claims, but also the general claim. The end result
of the review is that there is no basis for their claim. Therefore
the Incubator and Geronimo PPMC ask that Board to review the following
as a draft response and, upon approval, forward this to the ASF
lawyers for review and comment.
Draft Response as Attachment M.
By Unanimous Consent, the Board approved the measure to forward
the draft response, for review and comments, to our lawyer.
6. Committee Reports
A. Apache DB Project [John McNally]
The report, as noted in Attachment A, was approved by General Consent.
B. Apache Incubator Project [Nicola Ken Barozzi]
The report, as noted in Attachment B, was approved by General Consent.
C. Apache Maven Project [Jason van Zyl]
There was discussion regarding mavenblogs and that the
site and service itself, in addition to the Adsense
"stuff" was not fully "ASF approved." This will be
brought to the attention of the PMC and addressed.
The report, as noted in Attachment C, was approved by General Consent.
D. Apache TCL Project [David Welton]
It was noted that the reported noted that Karl Lehenbauer was
providing code that had been developed "from some commercial
work" he had previously done. This caused some concern from
the directors. It was noted that we have a signed CLA on
file from Karl, which should address this concern.
The report, as noted in Attachment D, was approved by General Consent.
E. Apache James Project [Serge Knystautas]
No report received or submitted.
F. Conference Planning Committee [Ken Coar]
No report received or submitted.
G. Security Team [Ben Laurie]
No report received or submitted.
H. Apache Logging Project [Ceki Gülcü]
The report, as noted in Attachment H, was approved by General Consent.
I. Apache APR Project [Cliff Woolley]
The report, as noted in Attachment I, was approved by General Consent.
J. Apache Commons Project [Justin Erenkrantz]
The report, as noted in Attachment J, was approved by General Consent.
K. Apache Web Services Project [Davanum Srinivas]
The report, as noted in Attachment K, was approved by General Consent.
L. Apache Avalon Project [Berin Loritsch]
The report, as noted in Attachment L, was approved by General Consent.
7. Unfinished Business
No unfinished business.
8. New Business
No new business.
9. Announcements
No announcements.
10. Adjournment
Scheduled to adjourn by 11:30 PST -0800. Adjourned at 11:14.
============
ATTACHMENTS:
============
-----------------------------------------
Attachment A: Status report for the Apache DB Project
-----------------------------------------
Attachment B: Status report for the Apache Incubator Project
Status report for the Apache Incubator Project
* Notable happenings in the Incubator
The project has finally started to function correctly and has given itself
a sensible set of rules.
We have now clear and useful incubation status files with the action items
to be done for incubation.
We have established the concept of PPMC, that is a "practice" PMC where
the Incubator PMC members and the Project members collaborate in the
management of project issues.
We have started asking status reports, the result of which will be
supplied to the board in the next report.
Projects are starting to ask for graduation based on the action items done
in the status files. MerlinDeveloper has graduated to the Avalon Project.
* any legal issues to bring to the board?
From the Geronimo PPMC: " A serious legal issue was raised by JBoss Group
LLC in a letter dated 10/31/2003. This issue has been thoroughly
investigated and the conclusion of the community is that the issues raised
in the letter are unfounded.
A question has arisen whether it is permissible to include XML Schema
documents for J2EE deployment descriptors in CVS. We have raised the issue
with Sun and are awaiting a response.
The community voted to keep the name "Geronimo" "
We are still waiting legal counsel to decide how to respond.
From the SpamAssassin PPMC " Copyright and distribution rights still
remain to be verified, although all CLAs should now be in, assuming Matt
Sergeant finally got around to it -- so it's up to ASF legal now.
The trademark issue on the "SpamAssassin" name is still in progress; as
far as I know, NAI legal still need to provide some documentation to DW,
Jim Jagielski et al. "
* any cross-project issues that need to be addressed?
I have read on the board list that the developers of the jakarta jetspeed,
jakarta pluto, Web Services wsrp4j, would like propose to the board the
creation of the Apache Portal Services top level project.
From my POV this doesn't affect incubation, other than having the new
Portal PMC as the Sponsor rather than the Jakarta PMC. I reckon that in
any case this would be highly beneficial WRT incubation, and that it could
be wrapped up and voted out quite quickly, because of the more focused PMC
(Portals).
* any problems with committers, members, etc?
The problems, as usual for us, come from outside members and committers
that discredit the Incubator, basing it mainly on incomplete and old
knowledge of how we work.
With the new rules we are using, with projects exiting, and with some
clarification on our site, I believe that these will get much less.
If the Incubator is functioning outside of its mandate, please let me
know.
* plans and expectations for the next period?
On the whole there has been a very big advance in the way we function. I
expect that to stabilize, with finalization of the last decisions on the
website.
I plan to start shortly a discussion about a general PMC charter with
general rules, that can in the future be used by PMCs by simply
highlighting the differences from the main text.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment C: Status report for the Apache Maven Project
o New projects
We launched the Wagon sub-project and the SCM sub-project and introduced
a series of components which will be integrated into the Maven 1.x
family and will be the foundation of future versions of Maven.
Wagon:
A general artifact handling library which is an amalgum of code taken
from the first versions of Maven, the Artifact plugin which has been
around for some time and some additions added by Michal Maczka. This
library is usable outside the confines of Maven and is not bound to
Maven. So it can be integrated in IDEs and it would be trivial to create
Ant tasks with the code.
http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/maven-wagon/
SCM:
A general SCM facade for many of the popular SCM packages. Currently
there is support for CVS, SVN, Perforce, Clearcase, Starteam. Again,
this library is not dependent on Maven and not bound to Maven. In fact I
am currently integrating it into a small IDE I'm writing
http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/maven-scm/
Components:
These are basically some common notions of Maven manifest in component
form. In the 1.x things are a static hairball, highly coupled and
resistent to change. The new components are all very small, are very
focused on their concern and all of them are very close if not at 100%
coverage.
http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/maven-components/
o New PMC members
Vincent Massol (lots of plugin work)
Brett Porter (lots of core work in the 1.x family)
Michal Maczka (scm)
Emmanuel Venisse (wagon)
o New Committers
Peter Donald (wagon)
Peter Royal (wagon)
o Goings on
I registered an launched mavenblogs as a place where developers and
users of Maven could push their notions, anecdotes and recipes for
Maven:
http://www.mavenblogs.org
We also launched this with some Google Adsense stuff and along with
other adsensed pages on the codehaus box it looks like we will pull in
~500US this month. This pays for the codehaus box and we hope to raise
enough money to buy machines for a build cluster which will run
Continuum in order to provide a real-time, live graph of any OSS java
project that wishes to participate.
---
We are approaching the rc2 release as Brett Porter has been working hard
to integrate code in several branches to get rid of the show stopping
memory leak we had. This has been fixed, we are doing some nips and
tucks and the release will most likely happen before the next board
report.
---
I got a blanket license from IDEA for Maven developers wishing to work
on the Maven IDEA integration which I've started as part of my little
IDE project and a couple of us have been chatting with the Mevenide
folks who are doing the Maven integration for Eclipse.
---
As per usual Sun has been little or no help with getting JARs placed in
the repository. Wow, big surprise. I'm hoping that Geir will pursue this
but I honestly have no hope left that anything will ever come of this. I
just feel like we keep getting glad handed as no one can actually do
anything inside Sun to help even if someone wanted to.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment D: Status report for the Apache TCL Project
A spot of good news: long time Tcl hacker and contributor Karl
Lehenbauer has got some interesting session handling code to
contribute back to the Rivet project from some commercial work he's
done with Rivet. We're grateful for the help and the quality code!
Not a great deal else to report. I haven't dedicated a lot of my own
time to Apache Tcl recently, focusing on some other open source Tcl
efforts.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment E: Status report for the Apache James Project
-----------------------------------------
Attachment F: Status report for the Conference Planning Committee
-----------------------------------------
Attachment G: Status report for the Security Team
-----------------------------------------
Attachment H: Status report for the Apache Logging Project
* The general@logging.apache.org amd pmc@logging.apache.org lists have
been created.
* The Logging Services web-site has been created. The Logging Services
site is CVS managed, module name logging-site. Log4j web-pages have
been moved to the site. Jakarta site has been updated to reflect the
move.
* New CVS modules logging-log4j and logging-log4j-sandbox have been
created. They replace jakarta-log4j and jakarta-log4j-sandbox
modules.
* New log4j mailing lists log4j-user@logging.apache.org and
log4j-dev@logging.apache.org have been created. These respectively
replace the log4j-user@jakarta.apache.org and
log4j-dev@jakarta.apache.org mailing lists.
* Various mail archives have been notified to change or add references
to the new mailing lists.
* The Logging Services PMC has voted to grant committer access to
Log4net developers, pending the completion of paperwork (CLA +
Software grant.)
* We are still struggling to understand the minimal requirements of
the Incubator project for the admission for the log4net project as
well as the other incoming projects into Logging Services.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment I: Status report for the Apache APR Project
Substantial progress toward APR 1.0 was made at ApacheCon, though
it's, yet again, not quite there yet. We spent a good deal of
time ripping out deprecated API's, but in the process found a few
remaining dependencies on them and thus could not release as
quickly as we wanted. But at least progress is being made, so
overall it's been a good quarter.
APR 1.1 will become HEAD for new development soon, with APR 1.0
being finished on a branch.
No new subprojects or particular problems to report... as with
last quarter, APR continues to be relatively controversy-free.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment J: Status report for the Apache Commons Project
Since the last report, there has been a new chair appointed (Justin),
several PMC members added (Scott, Henri, Daniel). The Commons project
has switched to using Subversion rather than CVS as part of the test
deployment of Subversion within the ASF. Work has also begun on a new
branch for the serf HTTP client code (which is still the only code in
the project). A new website (commons.apache.org) has been deployed.
However, most of the energy on the general@commons mailing list has
been focused on determining the relationship between Apache Commons
and Jakarta Commons. Product groupings have been proposed, and
several Jakarta Commons participants have expressed various levels of
discontent with the current Jakarta Commons organization to warrant
their interest in Apache Commons.
Yet, no real resolution has emerged with several Jakarta participants
expressing confusion as to what the 'correct' role of Apache Commons
is. The question can be reversed as to what role should Jakarta
Commons have in the ASF? Should Jakarta Commons be its own TLP, a
part of Apache Commons, or a part of Jakarta PMC?
It is hoped that the board could provide some feedback to both the
Jakarta PMC and Commons PMC about this relationship. The current
strategy from the perspective of the Commons PMC is 'wait and see' -
that is, Commons Project is open for business, will accept new
projects if offered, but so far no Jakarta Commons projects have
officially approached the Apache Commons project about migrating over.
It is unclear if a more aggressive attitude would be productive.
Finally, there has also been informal talk that the Commons project
should house the Internationalization efforts of the ASF. This has
been discussed on members@, but no discussion has occurred so far on
general@commons.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment K: Status report for the Apache Web Services Project
* Notable happenings in WS
1. Infrastructure work (CVS, Mailing lists, web site) for JaxMe,
jUDDI and WSRP4J is complete.
* what code releases have been made? [since the last report]
1. Apache Axis - Java 1.2 Alpha Release
2. Apache Axis - C++ 1.0 Beta Release
3. Apache JaxMe 0.2 (under Incubation) Release
* any new projects in process of being accepted?
We are working actively working on the following 4 proposals (see
http://nagoya.apache.org/wiki/apachewiki.cgi?WebServicesProjectPages/WebServicesProjectProposals
for more information)
1. Axis-J2ME
2. WS-FX
3. WS-ReliableMessaging (under WS-FX)
4. WS-Security (under WS-FX)
* any legal issues to bring to the board?
No progress on RSA with regard to WS-Security SAML Profile
implementation
* any cross-project issues that need to be addressed?
* any problems with committers, members, projects etc?
1. Daniel L. Rall and James M Snell indicated an interest in
stepping down from WS-PMC.
2. Need to "shutdown" WSIL (http://ws.apache.org/wsil) project.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment L: Status report for the Apache Avalon Project
The Avalon PMC has changed a few faces. We have lost Carsten Zeigler, but
we also gained Aaron Farr, Niclas Hedhman, Alex Karasulu, Hamilton Oliveira,
and Noel J. Bergman. The C# port of Avalon is nearing a releasable state,
so we invited the principle developers for that effort on the PMC to help
with the potential new developers and help us plan the best for that effort.
As to major community events for the past three months:
------------------------------------------------------
* We have fixed a number of bugs, some with the help of Cocoon
developers working directly in the Excalibur CVS. I think that has
proven to be a successful decision of the PMC.
* We helped the Cocoon project to move forward from the deprecated ECM
container, to the newer Fortress container.
* We initiated the process to migrate all of our bug reporting to JIRA
(still in progress).
* Restructured the Avalon site to be more easily navigable.
* Work/discussion started on the Avalon Repository, Env[ironment], and
Defaults utility packages.
* Migrated our WIKI to the new hosting software.
* OpenIM made a release using Avalon Merlin 3.0
* Increased our collaboration with the Turbine and James projects.
* For the first time since 2000, a core change to the API was made
without major upheaval in the community.
* Some proofs of concepts and work started on IDE integration
(focusing on Eclipse until JSR 198 [standard IDE integration API] is
published).
* Some heated discussion on Jakarta General mailing list regarding
Avalon and Hivemind. To my knowledge this is the worst thing for
the last quarter, so we are improving. It seems that at least one
of the messages sent from a member of the PMC might have been
construed as an official standing on the subject when there is no
official standing. All messages should be interpreted as the sole
oppinion of the writer.
Plans for the next quarter:
---------------------------
* Complete the JIRA migration.
* Update Fortress to use the standard Meta-info tools
* Make another release of Merlin
* Improve our integration with GUMP.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment M: Draft Response regarding alleged JBoss IP infringement
Dear Gentlemen :
We thank your for your letter of October 31, 2003 informing us of your
client's concern that JBoss code has been copied into the Geronimo
project. As we take all intellectual property infringement concerns very
seriously, we have carefully reviewed each Exhibit and other claims, and
conclude that there is no validity to the claims in the letter.
This review was undertaken publicly by the ASF and all discussion and
results are available via any archive of the Geronimo development list.
For your convenience, you may find an archive of the messages at this
URL:
http://nagoya.apache.org/eyebrowse/SummarizeList?listName=geronimo-dev@incubator.apache.org. The summary of the findings is available in our CVS
and accessible at this URL :
http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/incubator-geronimo/docs_nopublish/JBoss_20031031.html
In brief :
o Exhibit A's claim of a "high degree of similarity" between the two named
files is due to the fact that both files are derived from the same code
from and ASF-licensed Apache codebase, the Apache Logging (was Apache
Jakarta Log4j) project. We would like to politely request that the JBoss
Group LLC review their derived version of the code to be sure all
requirements of the Apache Software License have been followed.
o Exhibit B's claim of similarity due to the the same reason. Both were
derived or based on the same code from the ASF-licensed Apache codebase,
the Apache Logging project.
o Exhibit C claim of similarity have been researched in both the Geronimo
as well as the JBoss codebases, and we find that the similarity is due to
the same author licensing code to JBoss under the LGPL and Geronimo under
the ASL. Such dual licensing of code is legitimate as the author is only
granting a license when contributing code, not transferring all further
rights. We also verified that changes made by JBoss to the LGPL-ed
version were not brought to Geronimo.
o There is an additional claim regarding the Invocation class. We do not
believe that this is an example of infringement for reasons listed in the
summary of findings.
As an organization dedicated to open source software development, we are
continuously working to ensure that the code that we provide through our
many projects is free of IP encumbrance or questions of provenance. We
appreciate you bringing the concerns of the JBoss Group LLC to our
attention, and believe that our review has shown them to be unfounded. We
will continue to monitor Geronimo as we do all of our projects to ensure
quality of the code contained therein. Please do not hesitate to contact
us with any questions about this matter, or any further concerns your
client may have.
Very truly yours,
Greg, Dirk and Jim
------------------------------------------------------
End of minutes for the January 21, 2004 board meeting.
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