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The Apache Software Foundation
Board of Directors Meeting Minutes
March 30, 2005
1. Call to order
The meeting was scheduled for 10:00 PST -0800 and was begun at
10:04 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 will be used for backup
purposes.
2. Roll Call
Directors Present:
Brian Behlendorf
Jim Jagielski
Geir Magnusson Jr.
Stefano Mazzocchi (arrived 10:07)
Sam Ruby
Greg Stein
Sander Striker
Directors Absent:
Ken Coar
Dirk-Willem van Gulik
Guests:
Chuck Murcko (Treasurer)
3. Minutes from previous meetings
A. The meeting of December 15, 2004
SVN - foundation/board/board_minutes_2004_12_15.txt
Greg indicated that he had some additional information to
add the the minutes in SVN. This agenda item was tabled.
B. The meeting of January 19, 2005
SVN - foundation/board/board_minutes_2005_01_19.txt
Minutes board/board_minutes_2005_01_19.txt approved by
general consent.
C. The meeting of February 23, 2005
SVN - foundation/board/board_minutes_2005_02_23.txt
There was a lot of confusion regarding these minutes. Although
committed to SVN, and seen by at least 2 board members, it did
not appear in SVN. The minutes were to be re-committed. As such,
this agenda item was tabled.
4. Officer Reports
A. Chairman [Greg]
Greg reported that there was nothing really to report.
B. President [Dirk]
No report.
C. Treasurer [Chuck]
Lockbox services are once again getting attention from WF.
Expenses above and beyond normal last month included
$5000 for infrastructure meeting support, $1302 for new
equipment, and $299 to CSC for annual corporate filing.
Contributions for approximately $4900 were received, including
$2350 from UC and approximately $2000 from car sales. Contact
information has been filed with Car Program LLC.
Current balances (as of 02/22/2005):
Paypal $2947.12
Checking $15287.84
Premium Mkt. $100286.26
Total $118521.22
D. Exec. V.P. and Secretary [Jim]
We are seeing the steady drip of incoming iCLAs and the
occasional CCLA; these are being logged. The office
received a few checks from Car Program LLC, as well
as an invoice from CSC, which have been forwarded
to Chuck, who has noted his receipt of them.
5. Committee Reports
A. Apache APR Project [Cliff Woolley]
See Attachment A
No submitted report.
B. Apache Excalibur Project [Leo Simons]
See Attachment B
Apache Excalibur Project report approved as submitted by
general consent.
C. Apache Gump Project [Stefan Bodewig]
See Attachment C
Apache Gump Project report approved as submitted by
general consent.
D. Infrastructure Team [Sander Striker]
See Attachment D
Infrastructure Team report approved as submitted by
general consent.
E. Apache Jakarta Project [Henri Yandell]
See Attachment E
It was noted that there was some discussion in the tomcat-dev
list on requesting Tomcat be moved to a TLP.
Apache Jakarta Project report approved as submitted by
general consent.
F. Apache Lucene Project [Doug Cutting]
See Attachment F
No submitted report.
G. Apache Portals Project [Santiago Gala]
See Attachment G
Apache Portals Project report approved as submitted by
general consent.
H. Apache SpamAssassin Project [Daniel Quinlan]
See Attachment H
Apache SpamAssassin Project report approved as submitted by
general consent.
I. Apache Web Services Project [Davanum Srinivas]
See Attachment I
Apache Web Services Project report approved as submitted by
general consent.
J. Apache XMLBeans Project [Cliff Schmidt]
See Attachment J
No submitted report.
6. Special Orders
It was noted that there was a desire to discuss Batis, but this
was tabled in the interests of time.
7. Discussion Items
None.
8. Unfinished Business
None.
9. New Business
There was a long discussion regarding (or re-regarding) the topic
of the ASF obtaining an Executive Director. There were 3 main
opinions: (1) That the ASF requires a "true" Executive Director (ED)
with position, title and "power" normally associated with such;
(2) That the ASF requires an Administrative Assisstant (AA), to help
with such items as Fund Raising, etc; (3) That the ASF is doing
fine as it is.
The main voiced concern regarding an ED is that it would be
unprecedented for any single individual within the ASF to be so
publically known as "Mr./Ms. ASF." The ASF has historically actively
avoided any single person being uniquely so distinguished or
acknowledged. There is the concern on how this would affect the
developer and user community.
The main voiced concern regarding an AA is that the person would lack
any real power or authority with which to do their job.
One topic in the discussion which seemed to strike a chord with
most directors is the need for someone who has the time and
bandwidth to "stay on the ball" regarding issues.
Other than that, there was no real consensus within the board, being
split maybe 3-3-1 over the 3 opinions.
10. Announcements
There was an announcement that 2 well-known Open Source projects
have expressed an interest in joining the ASF.
11. Adjournment
Scheduled to adjourn by 11:30 PST -0800. Adjourned at 11:39.
============
ATTACHMENTS:
============
-----------------------------------------
Attachment A: Status report for the Apache APR Project
NO SUBMITTED REPORT
-----------------------------------------
Attachment B: Status report for the Apache Excalibur Project
* no new committers.
* no new PMC members.
* no releases.
* there has been some interaction with the Apache Jakarta Turbine
project, users of avalon-framework, with the prospective of more
co-operation happening in the future.
* work has been started on "fortress-platform", an effort to make
it easier to use our Fortress container.
* most other activity has been maintainance work and bugfixing.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment C: Status report for the Apache Gump Project
Brutus:
* access to brutus has been granted to Brett Porter
* access to brutus has also been granted to David Crossley,
Reinhard Poetz and Dave Brondsema to use brutus for Forrest
* we are rather low on disk space. This is no emergency situation
yet, we are dealing with it, so no action is required. If we
want to expand the variations of Gump builds to more VMs, this
will become a problem, though.
* we've received a few requests for nightly builds on Brutus but
not acted on it so far. One reason is the disk space problem,
another that we consider Brutus "insecure as hell" (to quote
Leo). Since Gump downloads and runs scripts from all over the
world it could potentially taint the nightly build system as
well, even if we are doing our best to prevent this (they don't
share anything but the JDK installation).
Technical:
* We are happily building C based projects using configure/make by
now. On our roster are APR, HTTPD and Log4CXX so far.
* There is slow progress on a Gump redesign that aims at making
Gump less monolithic and using Python like Python instead of
Java.
Other:
* no PMC changes, still all Apache committers have access to
metadata in CVS, no releases
-----------------------------------------
Attachment D: Status report for the Infrastructure Team
The Infrastructure Team has gathered for an Infra-thon from
March 18th (Fri) til March 22nd (Tue). A travel/lodging budget of
roughly $3500 was spent. The final number is not available at this
time.
All machines based at Mission St. have been move to Paul, the
new location of the UnitedLayer colo. Three passes have been
requested for physical entry to the colo, for: Brian Behlendorf,
Scott Sanders and Sander Temme.
Some issues have arrised during the infrathon, but none have
cause severe downtime or unacceptable discomfort to our projects.
Due to an error on part of the team we have now rougly figured
out how much bandwidth we would use without the use of mirrors;
rougly 70Mbps.
The power distributors bought as approved by the board have not
been used. It turned out that we can actually use the 0U PDU
that we already have, and, there is room for a second one.
We'll have to return the unused PDUs; Mirapath is working on
a quote for a new 0U PDU.
We are planning on moving all shell accounts to elsewhere
at some point. This will be hosted under people.apache.org.
DNS has already been updated, meaning our committers have to use
people.apache.org to log into their shell.
Also, we managed to get hermes (our primary mailserver) failing
every 7-8 hours. This problem seems to have disappeared after
a BIOS update and/or a kernel update.
Brutus, the current Gump machine, can remain under supervision of the
Gump PMC until we are done setting up the new Sun server, helios, and
loki, our machine purposed for running VMWare. After that, brutus
will most likely become our secondary mailserver. The plan was will
be shipped to The Netherlands, where it can do its work, and serve
as a fail-over in case of failure of hermes. However, due to external
conditions that are applicable to the IBM machines we cannot ship any
of them out of the US at this point.
Minotaur, our machine usually serving our websites, subversion and
shell accounts was relieved of serving the websites prior to the colo
move. We've left this to be the case because we wish to upgrade
the OS on that machine in the near future. We are synchronizing
content to ajax every 4 hours. We were planning to upgrade minotaur
to FreeBSD 5.3. Unfortunately there were some setbacks that
prevented us from doing a backup. We weren't feeling very lucky,
and have decided to put off the upgrade til a later point in time.
Ajax, our european hosted machine, is currently hosting most
of the websites (with the exception of tcl and perl), as well as
the wiki, jira and bugzilla. We've switched off the indexing by
search engines for the wiki and the issue trackers since the load
on the machine was insanely high.
Ajax too is scheduled for an OS upgrade, due to the fact that is
is stuck in IO wait half the time. We will however not be doing
this while most of our infrastructure is hosted by that machine.
It has held up pretty nicely, even when we at some point were not
using the mirrors and it was handling most of our traffic (we
peaked at 50Mbps).
Loki is going to be our machine hosting VMWare. We've added 2GB
of memory and 2 36GB disks from one of the other machines, giving
it enough beef to actually run the ESX installation. It's primary
purpose is going to be to host various OS instances for Gump to
run on.
Helios is our new Sun v40z. It came with a 1TB StorEdge RAID array.
Unfortunately it was delivered without an OS installed, no install
media, and, the FibreChannel card to connect the StorEdge to the
machine was missing. This will all be resolved, but for now we
are not able to swiftly put this box into production. However,
when put in production this machine will host several different
so called zones. One of these zones will be people.apache.org,
which will host all current shell accounts. Every PMC will most
likely also get their own zone, which it can use as a testing
ground/showcase for their own software. Finally Gump will be
given one or two zones for their runs.
Eris, our final machine, is stripped down to just the chassis
pending hardware to refit it.
The wiki has seen an upgrade, which was quite an undertaking.
Preparation was done for the Bugzilla upgrade. The final
upgrade will be done at a later stage.
Work is progressing on the Eyebrowse to mod_mbox migration,
preserving the Eyebrowse urls.
Subversion is doing fairly well. We've seen a number of repository
wedges, which seems to have nothing to do with the core
functionality of Subversion, but rather has to do with the add-on
functionality provided by ViewCVS. We are aiming to cure the
symptoms, since we have not been able to pinpoint the cause, by
moving our Subversion backend from fs_bdb to fsfs.
All in all the infrathon has proven to be a valuable experiment.
For the future I personally would consider limiting infrathons to
software work only, defering all work involving hardware to the
locals. The high bandwidth communication as well as the near to
full time availability of the entire team has proven to be
incredibly useful.
That said, the focus for our services will have to shift at some
point to integration and coupling as currently we are growing more
and more islands that in consequence require a relatively large
support team. Reducing complexity for our users as well as the
Infrastructure team is definitely something to consider.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment E: Status report for the Apache Jakarta Project
1.1. January - March 2005
1.1.1. Status
The last quarter is most notable for the Lucene promotion to TLP and the
promotion of JCS from within the Turbine subproject to its own subproject
status. Lucene is cleanly separated now while the only infrastructure tie
left between Turbine and JCS will be handled when JCS migrates to Subversion.
On the promotion subject, HttpClient is still pending promotion to
subproject status and Slide is still planning on applying to be a TLP.
The Jakarta site saw a lot of cleaning and revamping. It now mimics the
www.apache.org 3 column style and has had much in the way of superfluous
content removed. The download/mirror pages have been redesigned to increase
usability for both subprojects and users. This includes these board reports
being available online at
http://jakarta.apache.org/site/pmc/board-reports.html.
Release-wise, continued Tomcat and Commons releases were joined by new alpha
releases from the Tapestry and Hivemind communities.
Various legal-discussions have been spawned by Jakarta this quarter.
Apache's lack of oversight over unofficial translation sites, questions over
how to handle the ASF licence with javadoc pages and usage of government
public domain software. All are still not fully resolved at this stage. Very
recently there have been more branding issues with JBoss and Tomcat due to
an SD Magazine press release.
Lastly, JetBrains have agreed to provide licences to their IDE, "Intellij
IDEA", on an Apache-wide committer basis and not per subproject/codebase.
1.1.1.1. Possible plans for the next quarter
* HttpClient to subproject level.
* Taglibs, ECS, BSF, JCS, Cactus SVN migrations.
* Improved Jakarta level javadoc indexing.
1.1.2. Releases
1.1.2.1. March
* 9 March 2005 - JCS moves to Jakarta Subproject
* 6 March 2005 - Commons Logging 1.0.5 Alpha1 Released
1.1.2.2. February
* 24 February 2005 - HiveMind 1.1-alpha-2 Released
* 22 February 2005 - Tapestry 3.1-alpha-1 Released
* 20 February 2005 - Tomcat 5.5.8-alpha Released
* 15 February 2005 - Tapestry 3.0.2 Released
* 14 February 2005 - Lucene moves to TLP
* 06 February 2005 - Commons HttpClient 3.0 RC1 Released
1.1.2.3. January
* 30 January 2005 - Tomcat 5.5.7 Voted Stable
* 28 January 2005 - Cactus 1.7 Released
* 20 January 2005 - Tomcat 5.5.7-alpha Released
* 19 January 2005 - HiveMind 1.1-alpha-1 Released
1.1.2.4. December
* 15 December 2004 - Commons Transaction 1.0 Released
* 15 December 2004 - Commons-Net 1.3.0 Released
* 12 December 2004 - Tomcat 5.5.6-alpha Released
1.1.3. Community changes
1.1.3.1. New Committers
* 3 December 2004 - Warwick Burrows (wburrows) - Slide
* 5 December 2004 - Siegfried Goeschl (sgoeschl) - Turbine
* 18 December 2004 - Thomas Draier (draier) - Slide
* 3 January 2005 - William Glass-Husain (wglass) - Velocity
* 3 January 2005 - Kazuhito Suguri (suguri) - Cactus
* 20 January 2005 - Carlos Villegas (cvillegas) - Slide
* 9 February 2005 - David Brosius (dbrosius) - BCEL
* 10 March 2005 - Dhiru Pandey (dhirup) - Taglibs
* 10 March 2005 - Martijn Blankestijn (mblankestijn) - JMeter
* 14 March 2005 - Jim Jagielski and William Rowe Jr both joining
Tomcat/mod_jk.
* 15 March 2005 - Magnus Grimsell has been voted in and is currently
submitting his CLA - Cactus
1.1.4. Infrastructure news
Jakarta has replaced most of the nagoya references. While there are still a
few (250 to 300) it's a good improvement on the 1300 or so there were at
first and many of the references remaining are in the less active areas
(both committer and user).
BCEL, Commons, Regexp and the Jakarta website have all migrated from CVS to
SVN, joining ORO and Velocity. This represents about a third of Jakarta.
Another third are slowly on their way, while the last third would rather
stay with CVS such a time as announcements are made to curtail CVS usage.
1.1.5. Subproject news
(based on projects that have had a notable event, ie) release, change of
location within Jakarta)
1.1.5.1. Commons HttpClient
Commons HttpClient has had its first 3.0 release candidate and a final
release should happen shortly.
Much work has also been put into planning for Jakarta HttpClient (HttpClient
4.0), and initial development has begun. The focus of Jakarta HttpClient
will be on making HttpClient more compact, modular, and reusable. We are
currently putting together use cases to help guide the 4.0 development.
1.1.5.2. Commons Logging
Alpha release containing improved memory recycling during hot deployment in
containers without explicit support for JCL. Pushing towards a full 1.0.5
release.
1.1.5.3. Commons Net
Commons Net 1.3.0 was released in late December. This release contained a
large number of enhancements and bug fixes, but the most important change
was the addition of NTP/SNTP support. Since 1.3.0, there have been more
enhancements to the FTP parser (currently in CVS), with the ultimate aim of
making the FTP client configuration much more flexible and consequently
being able to support different locales seamlessly. This, plus other bug
fixes currently in the works, will form the basis of the 1.4 release.
1.1.5.4. Commons Transaction
1.0 final has been released in December. 1.1 already is feature complete and
in beta status. It mainly adds deadlock detection and a partially revised
interface layout. Slide 2.2 and OJB 1.1 are likely to use it.
1.1.5.5. Cactus
Cactus 1.7 has been released preparing the way for a big refactoring. We are
indeed going to refactor Cactus to leverage Cargo
(http://cargo.codehaus.org). Nicolas Chalumeau (contributor) and Vincent
Massol have been working on this. That should lighten Cactus and allow
supporting many more containers and features (like hot deploy, etc) which
our users have been asking for a while. Two new committers have been voted
in recently (Kazuhito and Magnus). EJB Cactification has been added recently
by Magnus and he's busy adding new improvements to it. Felipe is continuing
with improvements to the Maven plugin for Cactus.
1.1.5.6. JCS
JCS has been adjusting to to its recent move to a site level project and is
working on its first formal release. There are no known open issues.
1.1.5.7. HiveMind
Many new features have been recently added to HiveMind, driven by the needs
of Tapestry primarily; this includes the ability to switch the locale on the
fly (on a per-thread basis). This is used when accessing per-module message
catalogs. In addition, HiveMind may now make ordinary POJOs into services
(without a specific interface). The XML descriptors have been simplified, as
a package for the module may now be specified, allowing the many class names
in a descriptor to be abbreviated.
Discussions are in place now about limiting the scope of 1.1 so that we can
progress to a beta and final release.
1.1.5.8. Tapestry
An early alpha release of Tapestry 3.1 has been released. Tapestry 3.0.2 may
not be the final bug fix release for 3.0; there are discussions about fixing
a few more bugs and integrating Paul Ferraro's "friendly URLs" patch into
the code base for 3.0.3.
Refactorings continue in the 3.1 code base, in pursuit of JSR-168 Portlet
support.
1.1.5.9. Tomcat
This has been a quiet period for Tomcat, partially because I've been
extremely busy at school ;) We released versions 5.5.7 (stable) and 5.5.8
(alpha for now), each of which was a maintenance release addressing a good
number of bugs and user requests. Version 5.5.9 should be out within the
next couple of weeks, also addressing a number of recently reported issued
(none serious).
Two noteworthy items: first, adoption of Tomcat 5.5 has really accelerated
following the first couple of stable releases. Many users are reporting
satisfaction with the increased performance and stability. And second, we
have kept in touch with the Geronimo project, especially with Jacek
Laskowski (sp probably), working towards seamless Geronimo/Tomcat
integration.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment F: Status report for the Apache Lucene Project
NO SUBMITTED REPORT
-----------------------------------------
Attachment G: Status report for the Apache Portals Project
Executive Summary
Business as usual, some infrastructure bottlenecks, as setting up
Subversion repos require apmail and planning for movement of mail
lists. The only things that requires Board attention is the
potentially encumbering patents declared by Oasis for WSRP4J.
Standing Issues
* In the context of the Oasis IP policy brought up by dims, we found
that WSRP4J is significantly affected by a patent from WebCollage and
several from IBM. IBM grants royalty-free licenses for patents
affecting the standard implementation, but the situation WRT TBD is
not clear, as well as the scope of the patent. We are aware that
negotiations with Oasis are ongoing, and want to be in the loop,
both to provide any needed information and to clear uncertainties
on the standard.
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/wsrp/ipr.php
* We are seeing little cross-pollination between the different
projects, as pluto and WSRP4J are highly specialized
infrastructure projects, devoted to implementation of standards,
while Jetspeed and the portlet application samples are much higher
in the software stack. This attracts different kind of developers
at each project. This is not bad per se, but asks for higher
cross-pollination between the different groups. Common involvement
in infrastructure tasks will probably be key to achieving better
cohesion in the community.
Community changes
* Craig Doremus as new committer in pluto
* Diego Louzán as new committer in WSRP4J
* Randall Watler as new committer in Jetspeed
* Ate Douma and Nick Lothian were elected for the Apache Portals PMC
Releases
* Jetspeed-2.0-M1 (Dec, 2004)
* Jetspeed-1.6RC1 with preliminary JSR-168 support
* Pluto 1.0.1-RC2 (Dec 21, 2004) with bugfixes on the initial import
Technical events
* Jetspeed-1.6-dev dropped support of tomcat-4. Dropping needed for
compatibility with new JSR-168 portlets. Pluto had done the same
time ago, as the way portlet applications are deployed requires
very specific session sharing semantics
* Raphael has moved experimentally jetspeed documentation to Forrest
format, which he became familiar with through Grafitto. Most of the
community is interested, and it could help us to attain better user
support.
Infrastructure news
There remain several lists in jakarta (jetspeed-dev and
jetspeed-user). This and the fact that subversion was having
intermittent problems refrained us from the move to subversion. It is
in process now, I think we could manage it with a small push with
some help from apmail people to move the lists. The plan is at
http://wiki.apache.org/portals/JetspeedMigration , and cvs2svn has
been tested on the repository. Raphael Luta is the main entry point
for this effort. It would be useful if one of the four ASF members
in the PMC could get proficient and into apmail (privacywise simpler)
-----------------------------------------
Attachment H: Status report for the Apache SpamAssassin Project
Support needed:
* I need some legal help from some quarter to finish the Yahoo! patent
DomainKeys license review, but I had some help from Larry Rosen, so I
might just wing it at this point.
* There's an open question about whether we can implement our own
distributed checksum system to detect bulk email in the face of the
Commtouch patent (or if we can somehow get the patent invalidated).
Highlights of Events from December to now:
* SpamAssassin 3.0.2 was released on December 16.
* In February, receiving twice as many votes as the closest contender,
we took top honors in the Anti-Spam category of Datamation's Product
of the Year: http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/secu/article.php/3481971
* We are steady at 6 PMC members from a pool of 9 active committers.
We added a new committer, Daryl C. W. O'Shea, but increased from 2 to
3 inactive committers.
* We added a new "blogspam" list (instead of creating a subproject).
Some discussion has ensued, but anti-blogspam development outside of
the list seems stronger than on the list.
* We lost some core functionality due to a broad patent. The Commtouch
patent on bulk email detection (and their usage of it) caused DCC to
no longer be open source.
* Reasonable progess on finishing the ASF infrastructure integration.
* SpamAssassin 3.1 real soon now. It will have lots of good stuff.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment I: Status report for the Apache Web Services Project
Noteable Happenings
- Axis2 developers will meet for their second face to face meeting at
Colombo (Sri Lanka) on 29th,30th,31st of March.
- JOnAS certified J2EE 1.4 with Axis. The JOnAS team has privatised
axis 1.2 RC2 to make changes and has contributed back modifications.
- Apollo successfully participated in the OASIS WSRF Interop. The team
has taken on new committers.
- Muse team is currently implementing the necessary services for the
upcoming WSDM Interop. This marks the project's movement towards
WSDM 1.0. An Alpha release is slated for AFTER the WSDM Interop.
- Hermes team has taken on new committers. The Hermes name is up for
review, please see legal issues below. An Alpha release of Hermes is
slated for AFTER the WSDM Interop.
Code Releases
- First milestone release of the Apache Axis2 is announced. The
developers expects the release will lead to important feedback
from the developer community, and the interactions will eventually
yield a better architecture for the next generation SOAP engine.
- Axis 1.2 RC3 released. Pass Standalone TCK tests (JAX-RPC + SAAJ),
still working with JOnAS team to pass J2EE TCK (switching to
Axis CVS instead of private version).
- jUDDI 0.9 RC4 will be released immediately following the release of
Axis 1.2 Final. jUDDI 0.9 Final will be released approximately 2-3
weeks later.
- Muse Alpha V0.5 was released on February 10, 2005.
- Apollo Alpha V2.0 was released in early March 2005.
Legal Issues
- Apollo, Muse and Hermes (?..name will change) trademark issues are
being reviewed. Currently we've heard that Apollo and Muse are fine,
the Hermes dev-list voted on new names and the list is currently under
legal review by HP folks.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment J: Status report for the Apache XMLBeans Project
NO SUBMITTED REPORT
------------------------------------------------------
End of minutes for the March 30, 2005 board meeting.
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