The Apache Software Foundation Board of Directors Meeting Minutes July 16, 2003 1. Call to order The meeting was scheduled for 10am PDT -0700. A sufficient attendance to constitute a quorum was recognized by the chairman at 10:05am, at which point the meeting was called to order. The meeting was held by teleconference hosted by Jim Jagielski. IRC #apacheboard on irc.freenode.net was used for backup purposes. 2. Roll Call Directors Present: Brian Behlendorf Ken Coar (arrived at 10:08) Mark Cox Roy T. Fielding Dirk-Willem van Gulik Jim Jagielski Ben Laurie Sam Ruby Greg Stein Directors (expected to be) Absent: none Guests: none 3. Minutes and supplements from previous meetings A. The meeting of February 19, 2003 Minutes are not yet available for approval. [Sam Ruby] B. The meeting of February 26, 2003 Minutes are not yet available for approval. [Sam Ruby] C. The meeting of May 21, 2003 board_minutes_2003_05_21.txt in cvs.apache.org:/home/cvs board were approved by general consent. D. The meeting of June 25, 2003 board_minutes_2003_06_25.txt in cvs.apache.org:/home/cvs board were approved by general consent. 4. Officer Reports A. Chairman [Greg] Greg reported that, organizationally, things are quiet within the ASF. Not to say that there is not continued healthy discussion within the ASF, notably on members@ and licensing@, but that there are no items of concern. Greg was reminded that the PHP group was awaiting some sort of "write-up" on what needs to occur for the PHP project to become more inline with other ASF projects. This was mentioned during some offline discussions at LinuxTag. B. President [Dirk] Dirk had nothing to report. During the President's report, however, the status of the new machine, Minotaur, was discussed. It was noted that it should be online is very short order; final details regarding physical access and the like were being completed. C. Treasurer [Chuck] No report D. Exec. V.P. and Secretary [Jim] Jim reported that both the clas.txt and members.txt files under foundation CVS are being updated with the received signed CLAs and membership applications. He also reported that checks to United Layer, for co-location fees, were signed and were going out via postal mail. The checks were for half of July and for all of August (pre-pay). 5. Committee Reports A. Apache DB Project [Jason van Zyl] See Attachment A. Attachment A was approved by general consent and accepted into the record. B. Apache Incubator Project [Jim Jagielski] See Attachment B. Further discussion was held on the fact that there are still no "hard and fast" graduation procedures within the Incubator. Mention was made that Tapestry was graduated with no one ensuring that all procedural aspects were followed (received and filed paperwork, etc...). Attachment B was approved by general consent and accepted into the record. C. Apache Maven Project [Dion Gillard] A report was not received. D. Apache TCL Project [David Welton] See Attachment D. Attachment D was approved by general consent and accepted into the record. E. Apache James Project [Serge Knystautas] See Attachment E. There was discussion regarding the dependency between James and 'mailets' and whether those mailets "should be" available via the ASF. The main concern was regarding the impacts of having any ASF project being "dependent" on code that is "only" available via outside sources and only of a non-free nature. It was agreed that this is not the case with James, but it is an issue which needs to be addressed. PHP and Zend may be such a case. Jim reminded the board that one main reason why the Apache License is written the way it is is to allow commercial entities to use our code/products in "whatever" way they way, and having ASF products be deeply dependent on non-open/non-free items conflicts with this desire. Attachment E was approved by general consent and accepted into the record. F. Conference Planning [Ken Coar] Ken reported that the CFP (Call For Papers) could go out as soon as today. There was continued discussion regarding the veracity of Security Travel and still-not-yet-received speaker payments. G. Security Team [Ben Laurie] Ben reported that there was still some concern over the logging and tracking of security issues, as well as the list of ASF projects involved within the security team. Discussion on whether members should sign "releases" was held, with the result that it did not appear required at present. 6. Special Orders A. Discussion: PHP licensing As noted in the Chairman report, Greg had not yet had this discussion with the PHP Group, but would be doing so within the next week or so. B. Discussion: Spam Assassin (SA) group as an ASF project, license/contributor questions. The general consent was that SA would be a useful addition to the ASF, and that the entry point for SA would be via the Incubator. Exit point would like be a top-level project. It was noted that the required forms and assignments would be required for this to commence. There was some minor discussion regarding the fact that one developer is 16 years of age and whether he could legally signed the CLA. It was noted that this is not an issue at present since it is likely that his parents could (co) sign for him. 7. Unfinished Business 8. New Business 9. Announcements 10. Adjournment Scheduled to adjourn by 11:00 PDT -0700. Adjourned at 11:50. ============ ATTACHMENTS: ============ ----------------------------------------- Attachment A: Status report for the Apache DB Project [ received from John McNally ] Releases Torque did an alpha release of 3.1 in April and a couple bug fix releases (3.0.1 and 3.0.2) in June. OJB put up a 1.0rc3 release in May. Problems No problems to speak of. Mail list activity on both subprojects indicates forward progress and no flame wars. News A presentation on OJB was given at javaone TS-3368 Applying Open Source Web Technologies Together: Struts and OJB ----------------------------------------- Attachment B: Status report for the Apache Incubator Project The Apache Incubator Project is having the dubious honor of "incubating" itself as well as other products. Regarding the Incubator Project itself, there are still basic, fundamental issues that ideally should have been resolved before it started accepting products/projects. As such, things do not progress as smoothly as anticipated. Nevertheless, the following projects are being (or have been) incubated as we speak: o AltRMI: A transparent Remote Procedure Call bean. o FtpServer: A complete FTP Server based on Avalon principles. o Lenya: An Open-Source Content Management and publishing system. It is based on open standards such as XML and XSLT. o OpenORB: An Open-Source CORBA framework implementation. (donation to ASF/Avalon and licensing issues) o Tapestry: A complete framework offering an alternative to JSP & Velocity scripting environments. (graduated to Jakarta) In addition, discussion regarding the inclusion of XMLBeans into the Incubator is progressing as well. So the good news is that the Incubator *is* filling a void; the bad news is that we are still determining the best way to do that. A good summary of some of these issues was written by Nicola Ken Barozzi to general@incubator.apache.org in Message-Id <3F0A8B31.6070906@apache.org>. Copies can be provided as needed. Finally, I have noted my intention to step down as PMC Chair, for 2 main reasons: First of all, I think that it's in the best interest in the foundation to not have "the usual people" in various "management-type" positions. Also, as Chair, I find myself not being as vocal as usual (or as need be) regarding Incubator issues, mostly of a concern (unfounded, I'm sure) that coming from the Chair, it would carry more weight than it should. I have suggested Nicola as replacement. ----------------------------------------- Attachment D: Status report for the Apache TCL Project Not much to report since our last comunique`. We finally have another active committer as an ASF member, Damon Courtney, which we hope will help to bridge the Apache and Tcl comunities. Projects: Rivet - is alive and well, and continues to add users and functionality, while retaining its compact, fast and light nature. WebSH - mature. Lots of downloads, and few problem reports - apparently it works quite well! mod_tcl - not a lot of progress evident, but it also is downloaded lots, so I guess it works pretty well. NeoWebScript and mod_dtcl have finally been 'archived', and their users pointed towards Rivet. This has had the added benefit of eliminating mod_dtcl from the tcl.apache.org web site. ----------------------------------------- Attachment E: Status report for the Apache James Project Since becoming a TLP this past winter, the James community continues to grow. We are publishing point releases regularly, had two nice articles on IBM developerWorks, had a new committer join us, completed infrastructure migration to TLP, and had our most active committer become an ASF member! James current stable release is 2.1.3 with an alpha release of 2.2. The 2.2 release branch incorporates some more useful features that have languished in the experimental 3.x branch for some time. This trend of migrating new functionality from 3.x to 2.x will continue, and eventually I expect the 3.x branch shift to be mainly the migration to the new Avalon release. We are currently discussing an improved site and documentation creation process and separating the mailet API into an independent release cycle. James has a sister site as a depot for mailets, namely www.mailet.org. Danny Angus, a committer and PMC member of James, maintains it. The PMC had discussed creating a separate CVS repository to hold related tools, but we believe the mailet.org site is a suitable repository for mailets and James-related tools as it avoids licensing and committer-proliferation issues. We would be interested if the board feels this is a good approach for Apache project-related tools. We have no other issues to bring to the board. Thanks to infrastructure for helping complete our migration to TLP, kudos for Noel Bergman for becoming an ASF member, and welcome Vicenzo Gianferrari Pini as a new James (and ASF) committer. __________________________________________________________ End of minutes for the 16 July 2003 board meeting.