=== Apache Mahout Status Report: April 2014 ===

-----

Apache Mahout has implementations of a wide range of machine learning and
data mining algorithms: clustering, classification, collaborative filtering
and frequent pattern mining

Project Status
--------------

The project continues to have a large and active user base.  While
the developer base has continued to grow, there is a very active
and healthy debate going on about where Mahout goes next.  Please
see the Issues section below for more details.



Community
---------

* Andrew Musselman was voted in as new committer.
* No changes to the PMC in the reporting period.

* The main issue concerning the community right now is the addition
of new contributions from 0xData and the integration of Mahout with Spark.



Community Objectives
--------------------

Our goal is to build scalable machine learning libraries. See the Issues
section below for the debate in the community about our objectives.


Releases
--------

In addition to an ongoing debate on Mahout's future, the community is actively
 working on integrating Mahout with Scala/Spark,  and bringing in new code and
 committers to update the core project.

A lot of work on improving documentation has been done. The project has 
 finished the move from the wiki to Apache CMS, redesigned the project
 website and is in the process of updating all pages.

Issues
------
The Mahout community is at a crossroads in terms of where
to go next.  While the project has a broad number of users and interested 
parties, most committers are trying to maintain the code base on a purely
part time basis, when the amount of work to sustain these users
clearly points to it needing to
be full time.  Furthermore, much of our original code base is written
for Hadoop MapReduce 1.0, which many in the community have come to realize
is not well-suited for solving the kinds of problems that Mahout has set
out to solve.  There have been several lengthy discussions and prototypes
going on to work out next directions along the lines of the Spark and 
0xData contributions (there are numerous threads on the dev@mahout.a.o
mailing list.)  

The PMC does not think this requires Board intervention at this time
as the debate is, as far as we can tell, healthy.  We do, however,
expect that this debate will take some time to resolve and may mean we
won't be shipping a 1.0 release any time soon.  We will keep the Board
apprised of our next steps as we work through the process.