June 2012 Board reports (see ReportingSchedule).
This report is CLOSED.
The Incubator continues to guide podlings towards graduation. The shepherd model we tried last month is working fairly well, with most of the podling reports this month reviewed both by mentors and the assigned shephers. Meanwhile we're still encountering problems with mentor attrition. o Community Suresh Marru, Jakob Homan, Tomaž Muraus, Andy Seaborne, Arvind Prabhakar and Mahadev Konar joined and Ian Holsman resigned from the Incubator PMC since our last report. The following podling is requesting graduation to an Apache TLP: - Apache Flume The Incubator PMC recommends the board to accept the respective resolutions. The IPMC is currently voting on the graduation of the VCL podling. The question of community diversity as a graduation issue was discussed. See the Flume report for details. The following proposals for new incubating projects were accepted: - Apache Crunch - Apache cTAKES Initial proposals for Apache Parser and Apache Busilet were discussed, but they still need some work before acceptance. The Crunch proposal led to a discussion about how new podlings can or should be constructing the initial list of committers. The outcome of the discussion was that ideally, when constructing the proposal, the project toghether with its champion and possible mentors should decide whether to open the list to any interested people or to simply use an existing pre-Apache list of committers. The selected approach should be mentioned on the proposal and applied consistently. The Kato podling is inactive and we're considering retiring it. See the Kato report for details. o Releases The following incubating releases were made since our last report: - May 2012: Apache Mesos 0.9.0-incubating - May 16th, 2012: Apache HCatalog 0.4.0-incubating - May 21st, 2012: Apache Wink 1.2.0-incubating - May 24th, 2012: Apache Wookie 0.10.0-incubating - June 1st, 2012: Apache Syncope 1.0.0-RC1-incubating - June 9th, 2012: Apache Oozie 3.2.0-incubating In addition the Apache ManifoldCF 0.5.1 release was shipped under the /dist/incubator space as the project was still in process of graduating from the Incubator. The previously reported discussion about "distribution" releases reached a working consensus. See the Bigtop report for details. Cutting their first Apache release remains a big step for many podlings as seen in this month's report summary. o Legal / Trademarks The Flex trademark licensing deal is progressing. See the Flex report for details. o Infrastructure The many graduating projects are producing quite a bit of infrastructure work. This situation can be expected to continue for the next few months, as the number of podlings getting ready to graduate remains high. -------------------- Summary of podling reports -------------------- Still getting started at the Incubator (2 podlings) CloudStack, Crunch These projects are still getting started, so no immediate progress towards graduation is yet expected. Not yet ready to graduate (9 podlings) No release: Bloodhound, Cordova, Flex, Kalumet, S4, Openmeetings, Wave Low activity: Kato Low diversity: Bigtop We expect the next quarterly report of projects in this category to include a summary of their actions and progress in solving these issues. Ready to graduate (5 podlings) Etch, Flume, HCatalog, Isis, OpenOffice We expect these projects to graduate within the next quarter. -------------------- Bigtop Bigtop is a project for the development of native packaging and stack tests of the Hadoop ecosystem. Bigtop entered incubation on June 20, 2011. Primary issues blocking graduation: - Need for increased diversity and additional committers. Issues which Incubator PMC and/or ASF Board might need/wish to be aware of: A discussion of whether publishing non-ASF, but AL licensed binary convenience artifacts as part of Bigtop release is #1 consistent with Apache Software Foundation policies #2 desirable by Apache Software Foundation resulted in a very productive email exchange: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.apache.incubator.general/35545/focus=35627 A consensus was reached that doing so does NOT seem to violate any established Apache Software Foundation policies Given a difference of opinion on #2 a compromise was reached: starting from Bigtop 0.4.0 release, the project will vote exclusively on source artifacts and it will NOT use ASF infrastructure for hosting the resulting binary convenience artifacts. This decision was explicitly approved by one of our mentors -- Alan Gates. Community development since last report: Patrick Taylor Ramsey added as a Bigtop committer Our regular Bay Area Bigtop meetup/class is going strong with ~15 members http://www.meetup.com/HandsOnProgrammingEvents/ Bigtop meetup hackathon attracted more than 20 people: http://www.meetup.com/HandsOnProgrammingEvents/events/61455472/ Started submission process for a talk at ACM Bigdata camp Major Hadoop vendors/shops are slowly embracing Bigtop and using it as a basis of their infrastructure: - Cloudera: http://www.cloudera.com/cdh4/ - HortonWorks: http://drcos.boudnik.org/2012/05/hortonworks-disribution-secretly.html - Some uptake at EBay - Some uptake at TrendMicro Project development since last report: - released Bigtop 0.3.0-incubating - 0.4.0-incubating is on schedule to be release end of June 2012 - started working on supporting Giraph - started working on supporting Hue - started working on supporting Hama - used Bigtop to validate Hadoop 1.0.* RC and Hadoop 2.0.0-alpha RC releases - used Bigtop to validate HBase 0.92 RC - used Bigtop to validate Oozie 3.2 RC - increased the # and scope of integration tests - major re-factoring of package tests Signed off by mentor: phunt, tomwhite Shepherd: Matt Franklin -------------------- Bloodhound Bloodhound is an issue tracker derivative of Trac, with the goal of making deployment easy, and usage intuitive. Bloodhound has been incubating since December 2011. The top three issues that need to be addressed to move toward graduation are still: 1. Improving community diversity 2. Lowering the barrier to entry and development 3. Creating shippable releases and getting user feedback Over the last three months there has been significant design and development effort into the project, taking the codebase from being a basic installer to adding a new interface. The front-end design is considered to be complete at this stage but more work is required to implement this design. Despite this, the project remains installable and it has become possible for new developers to contribute relatively quickly. No new committers have been added over the last three months but we have had very welcome patches from new contributors. Activity on the developer mailing list seems to have reduced which is disappointing. This may be remedied in part by encouraging more discussion that currently takes place in the issue tracker to take place in the mailing list. The target of creating an initial release is ongoing. With the conversion of most of the interface to a new basic design, it is only completion of a subset of the dashboard design that should be seen as a requirement for an initial release. This remains the immediate primary goal of the community, and should help community diversity by increasing the exposure of the project. Signed off by mentor: hwright, gstein Shepherd: Dave Fisher -------------------- CloudStack CloudStack is an IaaS (“Infrastracture as a Service”) cloud orchestration platform. CloudStack has been in incubation since 2012-04-16 CloudStack has been in the incubator for approximately 1.5 months. Mailing lists have migrated, accounts for the initial committers have been set up, and the initial code drop/git repo has been setup. Many new names are now participating in conversations on the mailing lists, with several of them volunteering to help move things along. The number of submitted patches from 'new names' in the month of May is in the double digits, and range from trivial one line fixes to two major patches with over 1,000 changed lines each. The community is beginning to exercise some of its decision making power by deciding about release tempo, future version schemes and numbers, and a number of other internal plumbing issues. Much remains to be done in preparation for the initial release, and those tasks are being identified. We also have a number of external resources (bug tracker, wiki, CI) that are still awaiting migration. Top 3 Issues to address in move towards graduation - The project is using source and binaries with a number of non-ASF-approved licenses. This needs remediation. - Diversity of the contributor base still needs to be expanded. - While we are making progress, there still remains a number of large pieces (bug tracker, wiki, test infra) that still need to be migrated to ASF infrastructure. Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be aware of? No issues that we are aware of at this point. How has the community developed since the last report? See the above narration, but generally speaking the community is beginning to exercise its decision making powers, largely around internal plumbing issues at the moment. We are also seeing a number of new developers submitting patches. How has the project developed since the last report? The project continues to have many issues to tackle for its first release and is identifying and moving forward on those issues. Work continues on solutions to remove the need to massive (or any) amount of additional hardware to test/develop with in an effort to lower the barrier to participate. Signed off by mentor: -------------------- Cordova Apache Cordova is a platform for building native mobile applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The project entered incubation as Apache Callback in October, 2011, before changing its name to Cordova. - completed code migration to Cordova namespace - documentation updated for migration inc getting started guides - cordovajs migration for: ios, android, blackberry, wp7, bada - cordovajs migration remains for: webos and qt - Shaz crushed crazy iOS local storage bug; his solution getting a tonne of attention in iOS community - Tim Kim voted as committer - Intel contribution of initial Tizen src identified; they have submitted CCLA and we are waiting on ICLAs for their devs - RAT tool verified all platforms - Gord Tanner voted as committer - Mike spearheaded new Upgrading Guides, Domain Whitelisting - Downstream project shipped 1.7, and 1.8 Graduation concerns: official apache release artifacts remain to be verified by a mentor Signed off by mentor: jukka -------------------- Crunch Crunch is a Java library for writing, testing, and running pipelines of MapReduce jobs on Apache Hadoop. Crunch entered incubation on May 27, 2012. Community - Mailing lists have been created. - New committer accounts are being created, some pending ICLAs. - The Incubator status page has been created. Issues Before Graduation - Create Confluence instance. - Create JIRA issue tracker (CRUNCH) - Migrate code to Apache Git repository from Cloudera's GitHub repository. - Create Crunch website. - Make an incubating release. - Grow the size and diversity of the community. Licensing and other issues Work to obtain CCLA from Cloudera regarding license grant for existing Crunch GitHub repository is underway. Signed off by mentor: phunt -------------------- Etch Etch was accepted into Incubator on 2 September 2008. Etch is a cross-platform, language- and transport-independent framework for building and consuming network services. The Etch toolset includes a network service description language, a compiler, and binding libraries for a variety of programming languages. Status: The binding-cpp implementation has been making progress. We work on our graduation to become an Apache TLP. Nearly all issues are solved http://incubator.apache.org/projects/etch.html The PODLINGNAMESEARCH is done and signed off. No conflicts. The preparations for the graduation steps are under way. A new committer Thomas Marsh was accepted. The etch podling voted 6/0/0 to graduate. Future Tasks: - Development binding-cpp - Bug fixing - Graduation - Community development Signed off by mentor: Martijn Dashorst Shepherd: Jukka Zitting -------------------- Flex Apache Flex is an application framework for easily building Flash-based applications for mobile devices, the browser and desktop. Summary: A large community is losing momentum as it waits for Adobe to complete the source code transition and infrastructure. Date of entry to the Incubator: December 31, 2011 Top three items to resolve before graduation: - Resolve trademark donation or licensing - Complete code and bug database donation - Make at least one release Is there anything that the Incubator PMC or ASF Board specifically needs to address? The ASF legal team will have to agree to a custom Trademark licensing. Adobe submitted an initial proposal for the agreement at the end of May. Are there any legal, infrastructure, cross-project or personal issues that need to be addressed? (Are there any stumbling blocks that impede the podling?) Besides the trademark issue mentioned previously, the import of existing JIRA bugs is blocked by an issue with Apache JIRA's import utility (INFRA-4380). We just got news that this should now be resolved, the PPMC is testing the results of the import before activating it. Check that the project's Incubation Status file up to date. http://incubator.apache.org/projects/flex What has been done (releases, milestones, etc.) since the last report? - Carol Frampton is the release manager for our first release and has prepared some initial release candidates. We are continuing to refine the release candidates to respond to various licensing and policy issues. - Christophe Herreman was added as a committer and PPMC member due to his offering patches for issues with the release candidates. - OmPrakash Muppirala has been leading the development of a tool that allows IDEs like Adobe Flash Builder to work better with Apache Flex releases. Justin McLean, Stephen Downs, Roland Zwaga, and Tomasz Maciag have also contributed to the tool. What are the plans and expectations for the next period? Adobe expects to complete the transfer of the mustella test suite. We hope to get an initial release approved by IPMC. Are there any recommendations for how incubation could run more smoothly for you? Our mentors continue to be very helpful. See May 2012 report for other concerns related to JIRA and svn imports, but as mentioned above it looks like the JIRA import problems are fixed now. Signed off by mentor: greddin, wave Shepherd: Matt Franklin -------------------- Flume Apache Flume is a distributed, reliable, and available system for efficiently collecting, aggregating, and moving large amounts of log data to scalable data storage systems such as Apache Hadoop's HDFS. Flume entered incubation on June 12th, 2011. Progress since last report - Move the active development branch - flume-728 to trunk: Completed. - Flume version 1.1.0-incubating released from trunk on March 27, 2012 - Flume PPMC voted three new committers: Hari Shreedharan, Mike Percy and Will McQueen - Flume PPMC voted in a new PPMC member: Prasad Mujumdar - Development work going strong 146 issues resolved since last submitted report. - The flume-dev list has currently 103 subscribers with traffic of 3410 messages over last three months. - The flume-user list has currently 250 subscribes with traffic of 415 messages over last three months. - A Flume user meetup is being organized on June 13 in San Francisco Bay Area and has attendance to the planned capacity. Progress on graduation: - Community vote: PASSED. Vote (1), Result (2) - Incubator PMC Vote: PASSED. Vote (3), Result (4) - During the community vote a concern was raised regarding whether the podling had sufficient diversity (5). - The Flume community worked with the mentors to reach consensus for resolving this issue. - The diversity requirement was clarified and helped resolve this concern (6) (1) http://s.apache.org/Ckq (2) http://s.apache.org/DBv (3) http://s.apache.org/5Am (4) http://s.apache.org/DGH (5) http://s.apache.org/iI5 (6) http://s.apache.org/lE Signed off by mentor: phunt, tomwhite Shepherd: Dave Fisher -------------------- HCatalog HCatalog is a table and storage management service for data created using Apache Hadoop. HCatalog entered Apache incubator on March 2011. Since the last report: - We completed our second release from incubator releasing HCatalog 0.4 - PPMC voted in Francis Liu as a new PPMC member. - PPMC voted in Travis Crawford, Daniel Dai, Vandana A as new committers. Currently there are 90 subscribers to the user list and 77 on the dev list. There were 85 and 77 respectively last report (March 2011). Blockers for Graduation: None. We feel we are ready for graduation and will soon start the discussion on the list for it. Signed off by mentor: Alan Gates (gates@) -------------------- Isis Isis is an ALv2 licensed implementation of the Naked Objects pattern. It is based on contributions of the original Naked Objects Framework along with a number of sister projects that were developed for the book "Domain Driven Design using Naked Objects " (pragprog 2009). Isis was accepted into the Incubator in 2010, September 7th. Project Development - Removing modules that provide low/no value - Internal refactoring to simplify codebase - Started work integrating with OpenJPA Community Development - Isis has been selected as the basis for a new project - expected to include some funding for Isis' development - expected to run Jul~Dec 2012 - Mailing list remains reasonably active, some new correspondents - Restful Objects spec now complete, implemented by Isis and by (non-Apache) Naked Objects MVC open source project - submitted to OOPSLA - InfoQ article lined up for publication - presenting RO at 1-day conference Top 3 Issues to address in move towards graduation - only really one issue: need to demonstrate can bring in at least one new committer. At that point, we feel that we have done enough to warrant graduation (as a small but viable community) - hopeful that the new project currently starting will yield a new committer - the ongoing simplification of codebase should also make the codebase more approachable We don't believe that any of these issues requires Board attention. New Releases - None in this period - intention is to release 0.3.1 prior to next report Signed off by mentor: struberg Shepherd: Jukka Zitting -------------------- Kalumet Apache Kalumet is a complete platform to administrate data center. It covers the operating system tasks, middleware provisioning, etc. Kalumet entered incubation in September 2011. Community Developement: We are now working on the user guide, developer guide, etc. Blogs are in preparation to explain and introduce Kalumet. Project Development: We fixed console look and feel, issue on the model and agent, ready for a first release. Jira issues have been created to define the roadmap. In order to give visibility to the project, we plan to cut off a first 0.6-incubator release (as preview) next week. After the "preview" release, a QA campaign will start, including review on the documentation. It will head to a 1.0.0-incubator release. Web Site/Communication Development: The new website content has been deployed, including new sections. The documentation (user guide, etc) will be uploaded to the website. It's now available: http://incubator.apache.org/kalumet Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be aware of: None so far. Top issues before graduation: - complete and publish the documentation guides (user guide for both agent and console, installation guide, started guide, etc) - cut off a couple of incubator release Signed off by mentor: jbonofre, olamy -------------------- Kato (Report by the Shepherd) Sadly, this podling seems to have expired. There has been no traffic on any mailing lists since last report, and the last words were to the effect that no one is left with time to spend. The IPMC will most likely wind this up and store it into the attic before the next report. Signed off by mentor: Shepherd: Benson Margulies -------------------- Openmeetings Openmeetings provides video conferencing, instant messaging, white board, collaborative document editing and other groupware tools using API functions of the Red5 Streaming Server for Remoting and Streaming. OpenMeetings entered the incubation on November 12, 2011. Summary: Infrastructure and code clearance is done from the developer team and ready to be reviewed. JARs are no more in our SVN and a first NOTICE file for dependencies is written and to be discussed when the first official Release Candidate is nominated. The Releas Candidate is basically ready. We are just working on some issues with the Flash Streaming Protocol's variant "RTMPT", that is Flash Streaming over HTTP Tunneling. RTMPT is just a fallback protocol and not the primary used in OpenMeetings. Nevertheless it is important to sort that out, as the Tunneling protocol is needed for bypassing Firewalls. The RTMPT issue is basically a Red5 issue and we are hoping to either contribute or find other ways helping Red5 community to sort it out. Our 3 official GSoC students are doing good and we have weekly meetings where we discuss with them their projects. The results of the weekly meetings are published to the developer mailing list. We have a 4th volunteering student that does his GSoC project even if not accepted officially by Google. He does enhance the ATutor plugin for OCAD: http://wiki.atutor.ca/display/atutorwiki/Google+Summer+of+Code+2012#GoogleSummerofCode2012-13.EnhanceIntegrationofATutorwithApacheOpenMeetingsWebConferencing OCAD Devs have kindly contributed their existing Code under APL (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OPENMEETINGS-280) so that the student can work on it and contribute his patches to the Apache OpenMeetings. Community is growing, although not all people have found their way to the new mailing list and website yet. But we think that will change as soon as there is an announcement with a new release. Signed off by mentor: rgardler Shepherd: Matt Franklin -------------------- OpenOffice (was OpenOffice.org) * OpenOffice entered incubation 2011-06-13 OpenOffice is an open-source, office-document productivity suite providing six productivity applications based around the OpenDocument Format (ODF). OpenOffice is released on multiple platforms. Its localizations support have supported 110 languages worldwide. Most Important Items To Address Toward Graduation 1. Review of distributed articles to ensure compliance with ASF policy 2. Given the size and scope of OpenOffice, continue work on "community readiness" especially with regard to organization and communication style. We have started preliminary discussion concerning graduation as we would like to propose graduation within the next month. Issues for IPMC or ASF Board Awareness - Leaks from ooo-private to outside agencies Possible leaks of information from the ooo-private email list are being investigated. Our first objective is to first establish if and how leaks occurred. Once full details are available we will be working to address the issue directly. No action is currently required from the board and an update will be provided, at the latest, in our next report. Community Development/Outreach Progress Since our last report we have voted in 13 new Committers/PPMC members. Since our last report, 2 committer/PPMC members have resigned We have improved to act more as a self organized project to address and solve project related topics (e.g. forum moderation) We were able to initiate transfer of SPI funds formerly earmarked for OpenOffice.org to the ASF. However, due to changes in the ASF Fundraising chair, this transfer has been postponed. Followup with ASF Fundraising is needed to complete this transaction. These funds, as previously discussed, will primarily be used for developer travel when needed. We accepted an offer from SourceForge to host our older 3.3 version and provide client installs of latest release 3.4. This event was accomplished after much discussion among members and consultation with mentors. Due to heightened interest, we are putting more resources (services, volunteers) into translation efforts We are more putting effort into addressing trademark and third-party distributin requests. Ongoing emphasis as to how to accommodate and track these requests is becoming an important concern. We are increasing our global reach by recruiting volunteers to help update and maintain the large set of native language home pages Established various social programming accounts for additional outreach: Twitter, Google+, Facebook Setup two additional native language mailing lists Project Development Progress Pootle services for the project were established and used. Translation services will be ongoing as new contributors for this service join. We released Apache OpenOffice 3.4 on May 8, 2012. This release included: - Six different client platform install versions in 15 languages - Source tarballs in English - Software development kit packaging for 5 platforms - Language packs for 15 languages Over 3 million downloads the first month. A summary of downloads for the installs can be found at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openofficeorg.mirror/files/stats/timeline We are currently working on an alternate repository for category-B code to comply with graduation requirements An SGA was received from IBM for IBM Lotus Symphony. We are now preparing to import IBM Symphony changes into the OpenOffice repository. This should be complete by the time of the June board meeting. We are putting renewed effort into the "user experience". Apache OpenOffice is an end-user product, the best quality product and best experience for end users is one of our primary goals. Testing and implementation of old update service for OpenOffice has been accomplished. This service is for older OpenOffice clients to identify updates and, optionally, install an update if available. Community support forums remain popular with users but registration seems to have stabilized. The ooo-users list also is quite active. As Apache OpenOffice is a client product, we continue to investigate ways to direct users to appropriate support venues. Spam issues with the support Forums (reported in March) has been completely eradicated from community English forum with new counter measures (new users moderation and new moderators). A new root admin (imacat) has been promoted and is now taking the job to insure smooth running and consistency with infra requirements. The developer list, ooo-dev, now has 409 subscribers and is very active with post averaging about 100 per day Signed off by mentor: joes, rgardler -------------------- S4 S4 (Simple Scalable Streaming System) is a general-purpose, distributed, scalable, partially fault-tolerant, pluggable platform that allows programmers to easily develop applications for processing continuous, unbounded streams of data. S4 entered incubation on September 26th 2011. Infrastructure issues No infrastructure issues Other issues before graduation 1. Still working towards an initial release on Apache with the current code (version 0.4 = version 0.3 + checkpointing + bugfixes) 2. Complete the current work on the new version (S4-piper, 0.5), which is a major refactoring that simplifies concepts, API, and introduce new features such as dynamic deployment and reliable channels. 3. Grow the community. The activity around the project has been low and the project simply cannot graduate without substantially increasing its activity. We expect to get increased interest once we get a release out, in particular of the S4-Piper design. We don't have a release date yet, though. Additionally, committers have been having internal discussions with their companies and outside with their colleagues to attract more attention to the project. We have been able to attract some attention, but unfortunately that attention has not yet translated into more activity around the project. Project activity: - 55 Jira issues created to date - 10 issue reporters - 5 contributors according to Jira - Number of users subscribed to the mailing lists: 75 on dev (55 in the previous report), 91 on user (72 in the previous report) Signed off by mentor: phunt Shepherd: Jukka Zitting -------------------- Wave Incubating since: Dec-2010 Description: Wave is a real-time communication and collaboration tool. Wave in a Box (WIAB) is a server that hosts and federates waves, supports extensive APIs, and provides a rich web client. This project also includes an implementation of the Wave Federation protocol, to enable federated collaboration systems (such as multiple interoperable Wave In a Box instances). Most important issues are: - Building up community. - Extending the features set to match the features of Google Wave: Full text search, Archiving/Folders, Tags. Community: The mailing lists activity is stable and judging by questions on the mailing list - WIAB is already being used by private organizations and persons. There are also several commercial/open applications based on WIAB, like co-meeting.com and kune.cc. Jira Activity: - 18 new issues opened since last report. - 11 issues resolved since last report. Commits: - 30 commits to SVN. Project development: Upgraded the search implementation to use Lucene index instead of in-memory map. Upgraded "Add Gadget popup" - now it allows to search gadgets by name/description and also to filter by categories. Added more gadgets to the Gadget Gallery - now it includes about 75 definitions of gadgets supported by Wave. Some more small improvements and bug fixes. Some more developments not yet finished but in progress: - Migration to Maven - Full text search Signed off by mentor: Upayavira Shepherd: Ross Gardler - What is missing is new committers (none voted in since entering the incubator) and a release (none made yet). However the report does not address these two items. --------------------