Index Links: 2005 - All years - Original
                    The Apache Software Foundation

                  Board of Directors Meeting Minutes

                          November 16, 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 EVP.  The meeting was held by teleconference,
    hosted by Jim Jagielski and Covalent.

    IRC #asfboard on irc.freenode.net was used for backup
    purposes.

2. Roll Call

    Directors Present:

        Ken Coar
        Justin Erenkrantz
        Dirk-Willem van Gulik
        Jim Jagielski
        Ben Laurie (arrived 10:06)
        Stefano Mazzocchi (arrived 10:14)
        Sam Ruby (arrived 10:08)
        Greg Stein

    Directors Absent:

        Sander Striker

    Guests:

        Leo Simons
        Cliff Schmidt
        Geir Magnusson Jr (arrived 10:45)

3. Minutes from previous meetings

    Minutes in Subversion are found under the URL:

        https://svn.apache.org/repos/private/foundation/board/

    Append the minutes URIs to that to access them through the Web.

    A. The meeting of July 28, 2005

       SVN - board/board_minutes_2005_07_28.txt  [not yet available]

    B. The meeting of October 26, 2005

       SVN - board/board_minutes_2005_10_26.txt

       The minutes of  meeting of October 26, 2005 were
       approved by General Consent.

4. Officer Reports

    A. Chairman [Greg]

       Greg reported that he had nothing to report.

    B. President [Sander]

       No report.

    C. Treasurer [Justin]

       The arduous process of acquiring a lock box continues.  I've
       been on the phone with several Wells Fargo representatives who
       repeatedly confirm that all of our paperwork is completed on
       our side.  However, we are awaiting some paperwork to be
       completed on their side.  Once this is completed, they indicate
       that the lockbox should be operational in ten business days.

       I have opened up a safe deposit box at a local Wells Fargo
       bank and purchased a safe for my office.  I am also in process
       of opening a local PO box at a nearby post office and need to
       coordinate with counsel and Secretary to acquire the proper
       legal papers to present to the Post Office.

       I am working in coordination with Karen at SFLC to ensure
       that all of our financial and corporate paperwork is in order.

       I am coordinating with IBM and ConCom to arrange travel for
       hardship cases to ApacheCon US next month.

       I have also been informed by Jim that we have received a
       sizable donation check from Google, but I have not yet
       received it.

       I will be drafting a 2006 budget for discussion at ApacheCon.

       Current Balances as of 11/15/2005:

       Paypal               $   335.50  (+$   316.82)
       Checking             $17,111.76  (+$ 2,115.53)
       Savings             $119,292.81  (+$   184.26)
       Total               $136,740.07  (+$ 2,611.61)

    D. Exec. V.P. and Secretary [Jim]

       The date and time for the ASF (Special) Members Meeting has
       been set for December 11, 2005, 4:30 local time, at the
       Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina, San Diego, which is the
       location of this year's ApacheCon US show.  The 'foundation'
       repo has been loaded with the required Meetings/20051211 files,
       including the draft agenda and new member nominations.  As of
       this date we have 29 new members proposed.

       The scheduling of the members meeting has rebooted the
       discussion on what to do about "inactive" members, and
       how we actually define inactive members. Scheduling an
       agenda item or BOF session regarding this topic might
       be a good idea.

       As usual, there has been a steady stream of incoming iCLAs,
       with the occasional CCLA and/or software grant. The SDTimes
       award for the Web Server was delivered and received last
       week. No other items or notices requiring board attention
       have been received.


    E. V.P. of Legal Affairs [Cliff Schmidt]

       SFLC: Justin and I had a kick-off meeting with Eben and two
            of his lawyers.  Justin and Greg are already working 
            with one of them to handle any issues with our books 
            and 501(c)(3) status.  Justin is the point person for
            this work and will be handling ongoing status in his
            Treasurer's report.

       BXA/CRYPTO: The Perl folks sent out the required notification 
            for the mod_ssl stuff.  I've now taken their feedback and
            drafted a process document to run through counsel.  Jason
            has referred me to another EFF lawyer with more crypto 
            export experience who has agreed to review it.  

       COPYRIGHT NOTICS: Our counsel will be giving one final review 
            on the copyright notice issue starting this Friday 
            (during a monthly teleconference).  Should have something
            ready within one week after that.

       LGPL: I'm still waiting on feedback from Eben on my 
            Java/LGPL position paper that I sent him last month. He
            wanted to refrain from giving me feedback until 
            discussing the matter with the FSF. I expect to have 
            something any day now, since that meeting should have 
            recently happened.  I recommend we hold off any decision
            to allow distribution of LGPL components within non-
            incubating product JARs until getting this one last 
            opinion from Eben and then bouncing it off the rest of 
            our counsel.  However, I do not think we should have any 
            legal concern about separately distributing the LGPL and 
            ASF component that depends on it; both Jason and Larry 
            have signed off on this question.
          
       THIRD-PARTY IP: In the process of working on a document to 
            get us to a comprehensive policy on what third-party 
            software we will distribute and how, I have created a 
            little matrix to summarize the issues across the most 
            common licenses of interest to the ASF today.  I will 
            send this matrix to legal-discuss list today for 
            discussion.  It might also be helpful for discussing 
            how LGPL is similar and different from licenses like
            the CPL and CDDL.

       ASF LEGAL POLICY DOC: All these issues and more are being 
            written to live within a series of ASF legal policy 
            documents that I am hoping to have approved at or soon 
            after ApacheCon.

       HOUSEKEEPING: I've created a new directory /foundation/legal/
            Board to include all Legal reports and approved 
            resolutions with a README indicating that they are 
            compiled there for convenience and with a pointer to 
            the normative versions.


5. Committee Reports

    A. Apache Ant Project [Conor MacNeill / Sam]

       See Attachment A

       Approved by General Consent.

    B. Apache Cocoon Project [Sylvain Wallez / Greg]

       See Attachment B

       Approved by General Consent.

    C. Apache Forrest Project [David Crossley / Dirk]

       See Attachment C

       Approved by General Consent.

    D. Apache HTTP Server Project [Roy Fielding / Justin]

       See Attachment D

       Approved by General Consent.

    E. Apache Lenya Project [Gregor J. Rothfuss / Justin]

       See Attachment E

       Approved by General Consent.

    F. Apache Logging Project [Mark Womack / Stefano]

       See Attachment F

       No report received or submitted.  Stefano to contact
       Mark regarding status.
       
    G. Apache Perl Project [Geoffrey Young / Ben]

       See Attachment G

       Approved by General Consent.

    H. Apache Xalan Project [Brian Minchau / Jim]

       See Attachment H

       Report omitted since one was submitted last month.
       
    I. Apache Xerces Project [Gareth Reakes / Justin]

       See Attachment I

       No report received or submitted.  Justin to contact
       Gareth regarding status.
       
    J. Apache XML Project [Berin Lautenbach / Greg]

       See Attachment J

    K. Apache XML Graphics Project [Jeremias Maerki / Ken]

       See Attachment K

       Approved by General Consent.

    L. Public Relations Committee [Brian Fitzpatrick / Sam]

       See Attachment L

       No report received or submitted.  Sam to contact
       Fitz regarding status.

    M. Apache TCL Project [David Welton / Stefano]

       See Attachment M

       Approved by General Consent.

    N. Conferences Committee [Ken Coar]

       See Attachment N

       Ken further reported that he was looking for more help
       and "buy in" from ConCom and ASF members.
       
       Approved by General Consent.

    O. Apache James Project [Serge Kynstautas / Sam]

       See Attachment O

       Approved by General Consent.

6. Special Orders

    A. Change the Chair of the Apache XML Project

       WHEREAS, the Board of Directors heretofore appointed Berin
       Lautenbach to the office of Vice President, Apache XML Project,
       and

       WHEREAS, the Board of Directors is in receipt of the
       resignation of Berin Lautenbach from the office of Vice
       President, Apache XML Project;

       NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that Berin Lautenbach is
       relieved and discharged from the duties and responsibilities of
       the office of Vice President, Apache XML Project, and

       NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Gianugo Rabellino
       be and hereby is appointed to the office of Vice President,
       Apache XML Project, 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.

    Resolution 6A, Change the Chair of the Apache XML Project, was
    approved by Unanimous Vote.

    B. LGPL resolution

    This was a placeholder for a potential resolution regarding
    the ASF Policy for Dependencies on LGPL code. No resolution was
    forthcoming.

7. Discussion Items

    A. Replacement for Jim on Audit Committee

8. Review of Current Action Items

9. Unfinished Business

    None.
    
10. New Business

    None.
    
11. Announcements

    None.
    
12. Adjournment

    Scheduled to adjourn by 12:00 PDT -0700. Adjourned at 11:17am.


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

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

o Ant 1.6.5

Ant 1.6.5 is the current release and was released on June 2, 2005

o Ant 1.7

Ant 1.7 development is continuing in SVN. There is currently no schedule for
a 1.7 release. Some significant changes have been introduced in the 1.7 
codebase for ResourceCollections. The performance impacts of this change are
being examined. 
o Antlibs Subproject

The Antlibs subproject has progressed to the point where a vote is being taken 
to migrate some of the components out of the sandbox. The following antlibs 
are being considered:

1. SVN related tasks
2. .NET build related tasks
3. A Junit style test framework for testing Ant tasks

o Subversion conversion

The conversion of the Ant projetc to subversion is complete. there are currently
three Ant modules: core, antlibs and sandbox.

o Legal Issues

None.

o PMC

We have recently added two long term committers to the Ant PMC:
    Dominique Devienne
    Martijn Kruithof 

o Community

Community is healthy - no issues.


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

Community:
- No new release this quarter. Cocoon 2.1.8 should be released in the
coming days (code is ready, some doc generation issues need to be
solved). We plan to adopt a shorter release cycle from now on.

- 3 new committers: Arje Cahn, Ross Gardler and Max Pfingsthorn. The
reasons for the nomination of Arje and Max are worth mentioning: Arje
wasn't nominated for his code contributions but for his long-time
commitment to Cocoon and its community (among them the organization of
this year's GetTogether), and Max started contributing to Cocoon
during the Google Summer of Code.

- The 4th Cocoon GetTogether, yearly meeting of Cocoon users and
developers, took place in Amsterdam in October. A fruitful two-day
hackaton, and one conference day with 100 attendees. Although a
success, this is less than last year where 140 people showed up.

- A provocative post from Stefano Mazzocchi ("Is Cocoon obsolete?")
led the team to self-question about the slowdown on mailing-lists and
the future of the project. The main outcomes are that we must take
more care of our users (a lot of devs had left the users list),
simplify the Cocoon learning process, and be less shy at deprecating
old features that are no more mainstream.

Legal:
Nothing.

Misc:
The use of a user-friendly CMS on cocoon.zones.apache.org has led an
increasing number of people to contribute to the docs. What started as
an experiment is slowly turning into a production system, and we have
to solve some issues related to accountability of doc authoring (it is
stored in Daisy and not in SVN). We're also working closely with the
Forrest team to setup the publication process.


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

Issues needing board attention
------------------------------
None

Changes in the PMC membership
-----------------------------
Added Cyriaque Dupoirieux <cdupoirieux> [2005-08-25] as a new committer 
and PMC member.
 
Nicola Ken Barozzi resigned from the PMC on 2005-11-02 which was a sad day.
The reason is work-related pressure. Don't worry, nothing to do with
community-related issues, other than the fact that the community is a lesser
place with Nicola Ken's departure. Thanks to you. We do hope to see you back
some day.

General status
--------------
* The development community is healthy, with various new people becoming
more involved.

Issues still to be dealt with by the Forrest PMC
------------------------------------------------
* Continue our project guidelines document.

Progress of the project
-----------------------
* Steady progress has been made on the new Dispatcher system, previous
codename "views". This is the Structurer and Themer to build a reliable
common structure for documents, incorporate other content and provide hooks
for applying themes. New developers are getting involved.

* No release date has yet been set for 0.8 although our move to fully
utilising the locationmap internally is almost complete, and so the release
is likely to be soon.

* The Google Summer of Code project was completed. This provides a basis
for an Eclipse plugin for Forrest. Thanks to the student Anil Ramnanan,
and to Ross Gardler the mentor, and of course to Google. It didn't result
in new committers or steady new contributions, but Anil still pops in
occasionally. The GSoC did stimulate some more community-related discussions
about what it means to be a committer, although we already do this anyway.

* We have been making good use of our zone for continuous building of our
samples and our code. This reports issues to our dev community within the
hour, so breakages are quickly fixed. Also assisted the Cocoon project to
generate their experimental new documentation system.

* ForrestFriday. We have started a monthly get together on IRC. This channel
is a different name each month and it is only open for the day. We make
efforts to keep the main discussion channel at the mailing lists. The log
is added to our "events" SVN. It has been very succesful, and we think that
it also assists with community-building and getting to know each other.

dirkx: notes
	-> 7 active committers; 20 odd developers. Dev and Users about
	   the same patterns. Active. Overlapping commits in both
	   directions. JIRA shows pattern.
	-> IRC discussion positive and interaction richt; at least
	   on par with mailing list. Fact that it is archived and
	   published thus means it gets into 'google'.
	-> First event had an excelent summary for those not
	   participating. Later ones do not.
	-> 'sort -u' on PMC, recent commits and those participating
	   in the channel leaves holes; compounded by IRC handles
	   being obscure/anonymous.
	General discussion item -> encourage/allow more of this IRC
  	   but experiment with better ID's and summaries to mailing list
	   until we confirm wide community participation ?

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

The Apache HTTP server project has had a very active quarter in which
multiple products are being prepared for GA release.  There are no known
legal or board-level issues at this time.  However, we are stretching at
the seams in terms of oversight of our subprojects and need to consider
moving some of them to peer projects or reorganizing for better
management of subproject releases.

The list of PMC members has been updated with the addition of Nick Kew
to the PMC.  We have added several committers to subprojects, but our
current records of that are limited to mail archives and asf-authorization
files.  My future tasks are to find a better way to track contributors
and authorization, since I think the subprojects are not nominating
enough people to PMC status.  We also need to find a better name for
the PMC, since this should be a cool thing.

During this quarter, we successfully released httpd 1.3.34 (GA),
2.0.55 (GA), 2.1.7 (beta), 2.1.8 (beta), and 2.1.9 (beta).  We are
in final preparations for an httpd 2.2.0 (GA) release,
with the primary emphasis switching to documentation.  There is a
good chance that the 2.2.0 release will happen during the hackathon.

httpd-docs continues to attract new translators and new languages.
Much work is afoot to prepare for httpd 2.2.  The mod_mbox module
has had an infusion of new blood through the Google SoC program.
Likewise, a new mod_smtp module has been initiated by SoC committers,
and a mod_dbd module has been added for database interfaces.

The cli-dev subproject has little to report, except that user-to-user peer
support is working well on cli-users, and the next potential snapshot
is awaiting some commentary and feedback from the dev list.  With a few
more nags, we anticipate a new mod_aspdotnet release for .NET 1.0/1.1
within the next month, and with the release of the '1 year free' Microsoft
Visual C++, hope to have a .NET 2.0 flavor of the module in development
around that timeframe that most anyone can build from source.

The apreq subproject has nothing to report.

The mod_python subproject released a 3.2.2 beta and will try to get
a 3.2.x GA done before Apachecon (hopefully). The last GA release
(not counting security fixes) was 20 months ago, so this is pretty
significant.

Our developer guidelines and ABOUT_APACHE documentation is woefully
out of date, so that will be a focus during the run-up to major
releases this coming quarter.  We also need to figure out how
multiple protocol modules fit with the name of our project, perhaps
by changing our name or creating a federation.

Roy T. Fielding
(with input from William Rowe, Jr., Joe Schaefer, and Grisha Trubetskoy)

-----------------------------------------
Attachment E: Status report for the Apache Lenya Project

Community:
- No new release this quarter. Our regularly scheduled maintenance
releases haven't been done in the last quarter because the RM (me)
didn't get around to it. The long-awaited 1.4 release was further
delayed due to scope creep. Getting releases out again will be a
priority for the next period.

- Our experience with Summer of Code was a mixed bag. We had 2
students working on projects. One of them unfortunately failed the
project (he didn't submit code and was generally unresponsive during
the project duration). The other student, Robert Goene, contributed
good work on Lucene / Nutch integration. The code review of his
contribution sparked a number of new ideas for the future, and the
project is currently working on integrating his changes.

- We voted in 2 new committers, Josias Thoeny and Paul Ercolino. Both
have been contributing code for quite a while, and had been 'under
investigation' as potential committers for quite some time. The Lenya
PMC had a discussion about the optimal length of time before someone
ought to be proposed as a committer, trying to balance community
dynamics and 'committer inflation'.

Legal:
No open issues.


-----------------------------------------
Attachment F: Status report for the Apache Logging Project


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

-- mod_perl 1.0 --
 
The mod_perl 1.x is a maintenance track designed to work with httpd
1.3.x.
 
Nothing much happening on that track.  No new mod_perl 1.x releases
since the last report.
 
 
--- mod_perl 2.0 --

mod_perl 2.X is designed to work with all httpd 2.X branches.

Recent releases:

  2.0.2 - October 20, 2005


--- Apache-Test --
 
Apache-Test provides a framework which allows module writers to write
test suites than can query a running mod_perl enabled server.  It is
used by mod_perl, httpd and several third party applications, and
includes support for Apache modules written in C, mod_perl, PHP
and Parrot.
 
Recent releases:
 
  1.27 - October 20, 2005
 
 
-- Development --
 
mod_perl continues to be an active and healthy development community -
bugs are found, bugs are fixed, development moves forward as usual.
 
 
-- Users --
 
The mod_perl users list is, as always, thriving.  nothing noteworthy
has happened since the last report.
 
 
-- PMC --
 
it was brought to our attention that the perl pmc had been distributing
binary packages that included mod_ssl.  apparently this was an issue
due to cryptography export concerns, primarily because we had not filed
the appropriate notification to the appropriate US agencies.
 
as a result of working with cliff schmidt, bill rowe, and others, the
following notification was sent
 
  From - Sat Nov 12 14:03:24 2005
  X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
  X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
  Message-ID: <4362434E.1030303@modperlcookbook.org>
  Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 11:27:10 -0400
  From: Geoffrey Young <geoff@modperlcookbook.org>
  User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040927
  X-Accept-Language: en-us, en
  MIME-Version: 1.0
  To:  crypt@bis.doc.gov,  enc@nsa.gov,  web_site@bis.doc.gov
  CC:  pmc@perl.apache.org,  legal-internal@apache.org
  Subject: TSU NOTIFICATION - Encryption
  X-Enigmail-Version: 0.86.1.0
  X-Enigmail-Supports: pgp-inline, pgp-mime
  Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
  Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
   
  SUBMISSION TYPE: TSU
  SUBMITTED BY: Geoffrey Young
  SUBMITTED FOR: Apache Software Foundation
  POINT OF CONTACT: Geoffrey Young
  PHONE and/or FAX: 610.876.3338
  MANUFACTURER: OpenSSL Project
  PRODUCT NAME/MODEL #: Perl-5.8-win32-bin-0.10.exe
  ECCN: 5D002
  NOTIFICATION: http://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-0.9.7g.tar.gz
 
the binaries are now, once again, available for download through
several different download urls originating from apache.org, including
 
  http://perl.apache.org/dist/win32-bin/
 
since we believe our obligations have been met.


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

[ note: an october report was provided... might omit this month ]


-----------------------------------------
Attachment I: Status report for the Apache Xerces Project


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

Overview
========

Very little project level activity in the past quarter.  Gianugo
Rabellino has volunteered to take on the role of the PMC chair, with
the consensus of the PMC.  A resolution is to be presented to the
board for their vote in the November meeting and is attached as
Appendix A to this report.

Commons
=======

Only minor tweaks in Externals, no other activities worth
mentioning. No releases.

The move of some external classes from Batik to XML Commons Externals
is still to be done.

Axkit
=====

AxKit 1.7 released (yay!)
Waiting for infrastructure to migrate us to SVN.
Started some coding on AxKit 2.0 (for apache2)

Xindice
=======

All is quiet. No releases

XML-Security
============

1.3 of the Java library released.  Some discussion about reviving
  JuiCE.
A number of bug reports on the C++ library.

[ Appendix A was inserted as agenda item 6.A. ]

 
-----------------------------------------
Attachment K: Status report for the Apache XML Graphics Project

General Comments

Nothing special this time. Work on XML Graphics Commons hasn't started
due to the heavy activity in FOP. This is likely to change after the
first release.

Batik

Steady activity rate with bugfixes and improvements. No special events.
The move of W3C licensed classes to XML Commons Externals is still open.

FOP

Lots of activity. Patches are coming in from new contributors and a good
number of bugs have already been fixed due to feedback from people who
are trying out the new code. We are in the final preparations for the
first alpha/preview release. A little later than planned, though.

One new committer: Manuel Mall


-----------------------------------------
Attachment L: Status report for the Public Relations Committee


-----------------------------------------
Attachment M: Status report for the Apache TCL Project

[ received October 8, 2005 ]

Things are mostly quiet on the Tcl front, with a slow but steady
stream of commits to Rivet to improve things or fix bugs.  Websh
continues to be ably maintained, mostly by Ronnie Brunner at this
point.

Rivet seems to have done reasonably well in the community category
this quarter, as I've noticed an uptick in new people on the list -
not a lot, but all things considered, it's good to see.

Our goals are modest - we'd like to see a new Rivet release this
coming quarter.  Long term, the biggest thing that would be nice to
see is a port to Apache 2, but as long as 1.3 continues to satisfy the
needs of those in the comunity who write code, this is unlikely to
happen.

In short, these projects are "actively in maintainance mode" meaning
that they are well looked after in terms of code and community but not
getting a lot of new code invested in them.


-----------------------------------------
Attachment N: Status report for the Conferences Committee

ApacheCon 2005/US
------------------
As of this date, the conference is 26 days away.  There are
There are 201 people registered, of whom 27 are fee-waived.
Rough revenue for attendee registrations is US$130K.
There are 12 paying sponsors, with revenue roughly US$160K.
There are 16 additional sponsors who either have not yet paid
(or their payment isn't recorded yet) or who are paying in
kind somehow.  There are a 4 more sponsors as yet unconfirmed.
There are 22 tutorials, variously half- or full-day, but not
all have received enough enrollments to remain confirmed on
the schedule.
Three ASF members are being handled as hardship cases, with
travel funding being provided.  IBM wishes to sponsor that,
and is working out the details with Justin.

ApacheCon 2006/EU
------------------
We are preparing an RFQ for the 2006/EU show, and will accept
quotes from FCP and S&SV.  The intention is to have a clear
decision as soon as possible.

-----------------------------------------
Attachment O: Status report for the Apache James Project

No releases, no new committers, making movement towards actually
releasing new version of James based on final Avalon build.
Progress... slowly. 

------------------------------------------------------
End of minutes for the November 16, 2005 board meeting.

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