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The Apache Software Foundation
Board of Directors Meeting Agenda
March 17, 2004
1. Call to order
The meeting was scheduled for 10:00 PST -0800 and was begun at 10:03
when a quorum was recognized by the chairman. The meeting was held by
teleconference, hosted by Greg Stein and CollabNet:
IRC #asfboard on irc.freenode.net was used for backup
purposes.
2. Roll Call
Directors Present:
Brian Behlendorf
Ken Coar
Mark Cox
Dirk-Willem van Gulik
Jim Jagielski
Ben Laurie
Sam Ruby
Greg Stein
Sander Striker
Directors Absent:
none
Guests:
Chuck Murcko (Treasurer)
3. Minutes and supplements from previous meetings
A. The meeting of November 16, 2003
Minutes are not yet available for approval. [Brian Behlendorf]
B. The meeting of January 21, 2004
CVS - board/board_minutes_2004_01_21.txt
Approved by General Consent.
C. The meeting of February 18, 2004
Minutes are not yet available for approval. [Jim Jagielski]
4. Officer Reports
A. Chairman [Greg]
A lot of progress has been made on the legal front. We have
switched over to the new 2.0 license, and we've greatly
increased our CLA coverage. There has also been a lot of
discussion over the past month regarding copyrights, author
tags, and licensing (and incorporating non-ASF code). With all
of this, it might be time to sit back and take a breath.
B. President [Dirk]
Infrastructure
Two new root people have signed up to help out: Noel Bergman and
Erik Abele. This lightens the load on the current roots and
the rotation. More efforts are ongoing to automate root tasks.
Part of the new hardware as arrived at Sam's. The new HP server
has seen final approval and should be arriving in the Netherlands
somewhere in the upcoming weeks. A three CPU Xeon machine is sitting
at Brians waiting to be moved to the colo. There is still no
news from APC with respect to the UPS. Given the power incidents
over past period, action on this issue is suggested for consideration.
Subversion was upgraded to 1.0.1. Forrest has moved to SVN, its
CVS history converted. More projects are expected to move over.
Projects already using SVN are happy with it.
Steadily more projects are using the new wiki installation. The
UseMod wiki is still not frozen and the migration from there
is not definitive yet due to time constraints of contributors
(Leo Simons, who is handling most of the wiki related things,
in particular). The Cocoon wiki and the SpamAssassin wiki are
in the process of migration. A few instances of 'Wiki spamming'
have occurred, and were dealt with in under 24h. Furthermore
the configuration was updated to be more restrictive in what is
published (like usage statistics).
The obtainment of insurance for the European colo was
discussed. The general consent was that the insurance
provided no protection to the ASF and therefore should not
be purchased.
C. Treasurer [Chuck]
Address mixup with Dirk has been corrected. No new info on EFT
payment for United Layer. Corporation fee bill received from
Jim and paid. Accountant balance paid. Lock box services with
Wells Fargo for contributions is now being pursued, since we
have a bank VP here, finally. Sign up process for car donations
with two companies is in progress.
Current balances (as of 01/21/2004):
Paypal $2356.51
Checking $234.82
Premium Mkt. $103104.96
D. Exec. V.P. and Secretary [Jim]
After almost daily updates to the CLA listing, due to
the March 1 deadline before accounts were closed, we are
back to weekly updates. Our annual CSC renewal was
received and fowarded to Chuck for payment. Jim is
requesting a monthly office budget of $100 to cover
such expenses as paper, postage and inkjet ink.
Jim also noted that the ASF office received notice that,
due to the Sun vs. Microsoft trial, that Microsoft has
requested "confidential" documents which may exist between
Sun and other entities, including the ASF. The notice states
that any documents provided will be marked as "highly
confidential" and that serious restrains are placed on
Microsoft over their allowed use of these documents.
5. Special Orders
A. Establish Apache Struts 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 the Apache Struts framework,
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 Struts PMC", be and
hereby is established pursuant to Bylaws of the Foundation; and
be it further
RESOLVED, that the Apache Struts PMC be and hereby is
responsible for the creation and maintenance of software for
Apache Struts and for related software components, based on
software licensed to the Foundation; and be it further
RESOLVED, that the office of "Vice President, Apache Struts" 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 Struts PMC, and to have primary responsibility for
management of the projects within the scope of responsibility
of the Apache Struts 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 Struts PMC:
Craig R. McClanahan
Ted Husted
Rob Leland
Cedric Dumoulin
Martin Cooper
Arron Bates
James Holmes
David M. Karr
David Graham
James Mitchell
Steve Raeburn
Don Brown
Joe Germuska
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Craig
R. McClanahan be and hereby is appointed to the office of Vice
President, Apache Struts, 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 Struts PMC be and hereby is
tasked with the creation of a set of bylaws intended to
encourage open development and increased participation of
the Apache Struts Project, in the Java language as well as
others, and be it further
RESOLVED, that the initial Apache Struts PMC be and hereby is
tasked with the migration and rationalization of the Jakarta
PMC Struts subproject, and be it further
RESOLVED, that all responsibility pertaining to the Jakarta
Struts sub-project and encumbered upon the Jakarta PMC are
hereafter discharged.
Approved by Unanimous Vote.
6. Discussion Items
A. Discussion: Policy for Third-Party Code in Apache Releases
There has been too much confusion over what may be included
in a source code or binary distribution of an Apache release
from apache.org. Below is a proposed policy to be
publicly posted to address this confusion. The board would
also need to set a date for conformance to this policy.
1. If anything is unclear or in doubt, bring your questions to
licensing@apache.org. Better to ask early than late or
never.
2. Source distributions must be under the terms of the Apache
License. Source distributions may include third-party
software under other licenses, but those licenses must not
place requirements or restrictions on the code, even those
subsets of code, that go beyond those of the Apache license.
3. Binary distributions may include third-party libraries that
allow for redistribution in combination with code under the
Apache License. The existance of any library whose
copyright terms go beyond that of the Apache License *must*
be prominently mentioned in the LICENSE file accompaning the
binary distribution (appended after the Apache License), and
all requirements of the licenses of the third party code
must be followed with respect to attribution, labelling, et
cetera.
4. It is the responsibility of all developers to be aware of
the licenses on included code, to follow those requirements,
and make those requirements clear to the recipients of their
code.
The board approved the above "talking points" regarding
third-party code in Apache releases. Notice will be
sent to members@.
B. Set a date for the annual Members meeting (in May)
May 18th was sent for the date of the Annual ASF Members Meeting,
to be held via irc.
7. Committee Reports
A. Apache APR Project [Cliff Woolley]
See Attachment A
Approved by General Consent.
B. Apache Avalon Project [J. Aaron Farr]
See Attachment B
Approved by General Consent.
C. Apache Commons Project [Justin Erenkrantz]
See Attachment C
Approved by General Consent.
D. Apache Gump Project [Stefan Bodewig]
See Attachment D
Approved by General Consent.
E. Apache Jakarta Project [Geir Magnussen Jr]
See Attachment E
Approved by General Consent.
F. Apache Portals Project [Santiago Gala]
See Attachment F
Approved by General Consent.
G. Apache Web Services Project [Davanum Srinivas]
See Attachment G
Approved by General Consent.
8. Unfinished Business
9. New Business
Discussion of implications of Sarbanes-Oxley Act on ASF financial
structure and responsibilities
Chuck reported that this act could have substantial effect
on the current running of the ASF regarding fundraising and
accounting. Chuck noted that having an independent audit
of the ASF books would be in keeping with the act. He also
noted that having the ASF Treasurer also act on the fund-
raising team should be discouraged. Greg said that
he would look into some people to do the independent
audit.
10. Announcements
11. Adjournment
Scheduled to adjourn by 11:30 PST -0800. Adjourned at 11:10.
============
ATTACHMENTS:
============
-----------------------------------------
Attachment A: Status report for the Apache APR Project
A few things to report in the APR project this quarter. First,
by popular demand we are releasing an 0.9.5 release (the T&R
process is ongoing as of the time of this writing). At the same
time, we are splitting HEAD into an APR_1_0 branch (as we
reported we would in our last report). We had originally done
this at ApacheCon but then backed it out for short-term
convenience... we probably should have just left it in as
a forcing function. Oh well.
That brings up the second and more important point, however,
which is that we've had trouble lately with new contributors
to our project finding more and more frequently that their
submissions (by way of email) go unanswered. No one has the
time. We recognize this as more of a social problem than a
technical one, but it's one that we're seeking both social
and technical solutions for. Several suggestions have been
made on the PMC mailing list, and we will be following up
on them. We'll keep the board up-to-date on whatever corrective
action we take -- surely this problem is not unique to our
project.
No new sub-projects this quarter. No *new* committers or PMC
members this quarter, though we did welcome back Ryan Bloom
as a re-activated (no longer emeritus) committer.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment B: Status report for the Apache Avalon Project
Highlights of Events from mid-February
======================================
* Locked Accounts and CLA's -- Avalon has committer accounts locked
due to missing CLA's. Some of these individuals have expressed a
desire to have the account closed. The impact of removing their
contributions if no CLA can be obtained would be negligable to the
Avalon project. We, the PMC, are looking to the board on any
guidelines for action on these locked accounts -- at what point
should we freeze code? At what point (if any) should we consider
closing these accounts?
* The ASL 2.0 License has been applied to our source code. We still
need to apply the license to all our other documentation.
* PMC Membership -- Leo Simons has stepped down from the Avalon
PMC. Both he and Berin Loritsch need removed from the
committee-info.txt file. Still looking for an ACK.
* Avalon Mission Discussions -- There has been much discussion on
the Avalon mailing lists about our mission and roadmap for the
future. While this has been a hotly debated topic at times, I
believe we are moving forward and building a solid consensus. A
recent vote by the community confirms our direction as a single
project with a single architecture. See below for email thread
references.
* Releases: Fortress 1.1 and Excalibur Components Released. This
release was made at the request of the Cocoon community.
* New committer: Timothy Bennett
Plans for Next Quarter
======================
No significant changes from plans reported last month. A lot of work
will be on consolidating our Avalon containers and working out support
for our users during this process.
Avalon Mission Discussions (sampling)
==========================
[1] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=107832888500006&r=1&w=2
[2] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=107850438000003&r=1&w=2
[3] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=107890943900004&r=1&w=2
[4] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=107906872800002&r=1&w=2
-----------------------------------------
Attachment C: Status report for the Apache Commons Project
Well, there's been *nothing* happening in Commons since the last report.
That's partly because my last board report set off yet another discussion
about the relationship between Jakarta Commons and Apache Commons. Once
again, nothing happened subsequently. However, there was a spike in
discussion over in Jakarta Commons dev list.
The other component in the slowdown is that the developers involved with serf
(still the only codebase that the PMC oversees) haven't had a lot of time to
dedicate to it (following a rather intense quarter of activity though!).
I'm frankly at a loss as to what we should do with this project. I strongly
believe that the ASF *does* need a place to store small, reusable components.
However, I believe that the current situation isn't conducive to the project's
growth and I'm not sure what we can do to repair it.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment D: Status report for the Apache Gump Project
Most of the past few weeks has been filled with infrastructure stuff.
We've successfully migrated web-site, CVS module, bug-tracking and the
mailing list to gump.apache.org - many thanks to the infrastructure
team for making the transition that smooth.
All Apache committers have been Gump committers with the old setup and
this still remains true. We want to get as many people involved as
possible when it gets to maintaining the project metadata. This is
the reason that we've been sticking to CVS for now since we can reach
most Apache committers that way. Gump will probably be one of the
last projects that make the transition to Subversion.
Work on the project bylaws has started and we expect to have them
ready for the next board meeting. Gump is unique when it comes to
committer status so we'll have to put some thoughts into the
definition of that role.
Gump has been quite successful in pointing out problems in some builds
recently and we are happy that most of them have been resolved between
projects easily. Our biggest problem right now is building Avalon,
but this may be due to the fact that Gump is using a different build
system than Avalon more than anything else. Once Gump supports Maven
as a build option, things may become easier for Avalon.
We continue improving the Python rewrite of Gump and have come quite a
long way already. Since nobody of us is anywhere near a Python guru,
we may be doing things far more complicated than necessary. Any help
is welcome. 8-)
The short-to-mid-term future steps for Gump are
* get dedicated ASF hardware to run Gump on - [currently working on
getting it running on Moof but we are really looking forward to
the new gump-dedicated machine].
* expand Gump's reach beyond building Java projects.
* improve the way Gump works by trying to find an computationally
feasible way to nagging the offender and not the offended, improve
the usability/effectiveness of gump reports, find ways to increase
adoption by making social pressure of nagging more effective and
ease the effort required for users to update their project
descriptors.
* start thinking on how to provide feedback for legal dependencies
checkings
-----------------------------------------
Attachment E: Status report for the Apache Jakarta Project
The Jakarta community would like to mention an official thanks and warm
and heartfelt appreciation to our outgoing chair, Sam Ruby. We
recognize that he was instrumental in guiding it through a sometimes
difficult period of high growth, and we all value his considerate and
thoughtful contributions.
Jakarta Project Report - March 2004
-----------------------------------
* As the board is obviously aware, the Jakarta PMC has changed chairs,
with the retirement :) of Sam Ruby and the appointment of Geir
Magnusson Jr.
* We officially added 37 committers to the Jakarta PMC. These
additions were from the previous two months, and we are starting the
process of identifying new candidates and voting again.
* We feel we had a successful transition to the new Apache Software
License v2.0 The entire Jakarta Commons and commons sandbox has been
converted, and the community is very aware of the need to ensure that
both the spirit and letter of the boards instructions regarding the
license are followed. Thanks to all at the ASF for help in clearing up
our questions regarding the process.
* The HiveMind codebase currently located in Jakarta Commons has
completed it's software grant from WebCT, the employer of the primary
author, and the Jakarta PMC has approved a proposal to make HiveMind a
new Jakarta sub-project. Along with the PMC's support, the community
response to the proposal was very positive. We have checked with the
Incubator PMC, and there have been no other issues raised preventing
this from happening.
* The Jakarta Struts sub-project has voted to apply for ASF top-level
project status. The Jakarta PMC supports this and urges the board to
accept their proposal ASAP.
* The HttpClient component of Jakarta Commons has voted to apply for
Jakarta sub-project status. We are waiting the formal proposal, and
don't foresee any problems.
* We recognize that our charter is woefully inadequate, and intend to
produce a revision to submit for board approval in the near future.
* The Jakarta PMC had a long and sometimes heated discussion about the
board's recommendation that author tags be removed from code. I think
that we collectively understand the motivation and how a community has
to be careful that author tags don't lead to territorial ownership of
what is community-owned code. However, I urge that the board do not
mandate their removal, allowing the individual communities to police
themselves on this issue. Many of us, myself included, value the
author tags because we recognize that it's human nature to be proud of
one's work, and the author tag is [one] way in which new community
members can initially find value in contribution. Finally, we would
appreciate some clarification on how removal of the tags changes the
legal exposure of the committers or the ASF. I, for one, don't grok
the legal argument.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment F: Status report for the Apache Portals Project
The Portals project infrastructure setup has proceeded rather slowly,
due to most involved people being buried in their dayjobs and having
little time and energy remaining. We all expect that during March we
can have all infrastructure issues solved and start offering a
"visible" website, lists and repositories.
* The pmc@portals.apache.org and general@portals.apache.org mailing
lists were setup. It was agreed to keep separate -dev lists for the
different modules, instead of merging them together into a unique -dev
list.
* The Portals PMC agreed to accept the Pluto codebase in the Apache
Portals project. This vote was held (incorrectly) in the pmc list, and
will be repeated in the public general list once this list has been
publicized.
* David Taylor will use Maven to generate the web site, and he is
contacting people who can help to design a logo for the Portals effort.
* Pluto is currently in the process of preparing the first release -
Carsten Ziegeler has taken over the task of the release manager and it
seems that the team will have finished all open tasks in early April.
* Santiago Gala will ask for a graduation vote of pluto out of the
incubator and into the portals project, and follow up whatever needs to
be done to successfully graduate pluto.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment G: Status report for the Apache Web Services Project
* JaxMe has graduated from Incubator.
* jUDDI is in the process of graduation.
* Teething (infrastructure/processes) issue releasing SNAPSHOT and
and releases of ws projects to ASF java repository. We are still
finalizing the procedure.
* All projects now use JIRA instead of Bugzilla.
* Apache Axis and WS-FX projects are now under ASLv2. Others will
follow.
* Can the board please "issue" a "memo/procedure" to all the PMC's regarding
how to review 3rd party software. Need summary as there were
way too many emails on the subject.
------------------------------------------------------
End of minutes for the March 17, 2004 board meeting.
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