SUBMITTED 10 July 2024 ## Description:
The mission of Apache Fineract is the creation and maintenance of software
related to a core banking platform that provides a reliable, robust, and
affordable solution for entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and service
providers to offer financial services to the world's underbanked and unbanked.
## Project Status:
Current project status: Ongoing, with delays in getting out releases.
Issues for the board: Nothing critical.
## Membership Data:
Apache Fineract was founded 2017-04-18 (7 years ago)
There are currently 52 committers and 24 PMC members in this project.
The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 7:3.
Community changes, past quarter:
- No new PMC members. Last addition was Adam Saghy on 2023-07-10.
- No new committers. Last addition was Peter Bagrij on 2023-12-01.
## Project Activity:
Release 1.9 on 2024-01-12
Release 1.10.0 process was started in April 2024 but is stalled.
There are open security issues.
## Community Health:
Overall, the community seems healthy and we are attempting to bring more organization, transparency and focus to the project. There are concerns about concentration, maintainability, and approachability.
We implemented a Significant Improvement Project (SIG) pattern and four proposals have gone through approval with additional transparency enabling better discussion about these key efforts.
Also on the positive side, there were presentations at Community over Code Europe and some discussions there about how to ensure better alignment on the project. A project roadmap was discussed there but has not yet been made visible to the list.
Some concern has been expressed of devs concentrated at 2-3 vendors, with more than 70% of contributions coming from one project effort.
These efforts recently have been designed to refactor key components to make them more modern and flexible. It is possible the refactoring will leave some implementations behind, as upgrade paths are difficult given both extensive forking and configuration specifics.
###Scarf
The community has implemented Scarf which now is set up to gather data from downloads, main web landing page, docker-hub, and various wiki pages. The idea is to understand better who is looking and interested in the project and to understand what gaps they see.
Two vendors are sharing the cost of paying for the scarf service, and the data - which started in June - is available to members of the PMC. The data is showing hundreds of downloads and visits per month.
###Docker-HUB is now working
After much discussion, and after work by Victor, we re-established the docker-hub (ASF Account) using more standard docker build patterns.
The previous build on docker-hub had not built successfully for over 28 months. This was a welcomed contribution.
###GSOC
GSOC participation is being coordinated through Mifos, as no one from the Fineract(R) project stepped forward, although these are some of the same people/committers. This was discussed with ASF GSOC coordinators who gave approval.
###Authentication and Security Framework: Repeating what we wrote in April 2024 report.
We published a "how to secure Fineract", which we hope will help. Securing Fineract.
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FINERACT/Securing+Fineract
The home grown security framework (authentication, authorization, and access
control mechanisms) remains an issue of concern and is the subject of SIP#1.
We ask our community users to please be aware that they should NOT run this
without understanding the ins and outs of running the software securely. I've
suggested that there are Vendors that could help with that. I have a concern
that entities are putting this project "as is" directly on the internet,
hosting lending activities and potentially banking activities without any
proper security measures.
###Emeritus status:
We are delayed in our plans to remove people who are no longer active, per the
PMC decision of May 2023. We have this as an action item.
###Guild
No further steps have been taken on this.