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From: "Noel J. Bergman" <noel@devtech.com>
To: <board@apache.org>
Cc: <general@incubator.apache.org>
Subject: Incubator Board Report October 2008
Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:24:38 -0400
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In general the Incubator is operating well.

The Bluesky project, which has been an area of concern, has submitted a
report this month.

A number of us have asked that the Maven Repository issues, which has
swamped the general@ list for more than a month almost to the exclusion of
all other discussion, be moved from the Incubator to Infrastructure.  Yes,
the Incubator is effected in terms of our requirement that users be aware of
and agree to the use of Incubator artifacts, as the Incubator has long been
charged with maintaining the distinction that Incubator projects are "not
yet fully endorsed by the ASF" in large part to protect the Apache brand and
imprimatur.  But although Maven's lack of support for authenticated and
approved artifacts does effect the Incubator's ability to perform that role,
discussion and correction of that defect really belong at the Infrastructure
level, as the scope of its consequences is much more serious and widespread.

Unresolved for now is what to do about Incubator artifacts and Maven in the
interim.  It is unclear that there is a solution that allows Incubator
projects to publish into the Maven repository at all without violating the
policy regarding explicit user knowledge and consent.

The discussion of the issues caused by Maven's repository handling has led
to revisiting under what circumstances Incubator projects should be
permitted to do releases, if at all.  Personally, I would consider it
unfortunate, unfair, and a shame if we were to decide to return to the
prohibition against releases due to a build tool's inadequacies, nor do I
believe that most people want that to happen.  Others, mostly Maven users,
would like to see any distinction between the Incubator and the ASF
eliminated, which is also an undesirable approach.  There has also been
confusion evidenced about what the Apache License permits anyone to do with
the our code versus policies that the ASF self-imposes on its projects.

We are reminding all projects to provide, at a minimum, the following
information:

 * The "incubating since" info
 * The project's top 2 or 3 things to resolve prior to graduation
 * A short description of what your project's software does

Not all of them have yet complied, but we're working on it.

We're looking at various projects to see if they are ready to graduate,
whether as or into a TLP, and have new projects arriving, one from the
Apache Labs.  Pig appears ready, and is being voted on, to leave the
Incubator for the Hadoop project.  We need to examine QPid and UIMA
regarding graduation.

-----------------------------------------------------------

= BlueSky =

Now, BlueSky ASF Project is running in the first phase. A lot of efforts are
done to legalize the BlueSky source code under Apache licence. For RealClass
system source code, there are three main third-part libraries whose licences
do not comply with ASL definitely. They are GUN c++ stl, arts and ffmpeg.
The issue that dynamic link with GPLed GUN c++ stl in RealClass system
source code is legal or not have been discussing in bluesky mailing list.
The conflict which the other two libraries lead to are so complicated that
more time is spent and discuss in details to resolve this problem.

Besides ,we do the following:

 * In order to introduce RealClass system's functions, feature and usage, we
supply the document about system customer manual to BlueSky website.
 * Due to conflict with ASL, the work of committing the source code is
behind of the schedule.


= Empire-DB =

Empire-db has been accepted to the incubator in July 2008. While ths SVN
repository had soon been set up and development progressed there has until
now not been an official Apache release with the packages containting the
org.apache namespace and with all legal files available and in the right
place.

Recent activity:

The main concern of the Empire-db committers in the previous month has been
the acceptance of the first official Apache release by members of the
incubator PMC.

Due to legal concerns about the inclusion of two .jar files the distribution
was first changed to go without them which however resulted in compilation
problems with the build files provided. After a long discussion period the
two jars which were taken from a Tomcat distribution where included again
and release candidate 2 of Empire-db 2.0.4 and Struts2-extentions 1.0.4 were
again put up for voting. Finally the release got accepted incubator PMC.
The accepted distribution files will now be offered for download from the
Empire-db website. (Yet to be done)

Meanwhile a few improvement and bufixing tasks have already been opened for
the upcoming 2.0.5 release.

Community aspects:

Slowly the empire-user mailing list is getting used by uses not belonging to
the empire-db development team. A few mail requests have been answered. With
the now accepted official Apache release we hope that we can now further
increase the community.


= PhotArk =

Apache !PhotArk will be a complete open source photo gallery application
including a content repository for the images, a display piece, an access
control layer, and upload capabilities.

 PhotArk has been accepted for Incubation in August 19, 2008.

 Top Issues before graduation
   * Grow community

 Community Aspects
   * All infrastructure resources are available.
   * Initial committer accounts are ready.
   * Initial website ready and live.
   * Initial application prototype available in svn trunk.


= Click =

Click is a page and component oriented web application framework.

Click entered the incubator in July 2008.

 * The initial committers submitted their ICLA's and accounts have been
created.
 * Mailing lists were created and the community have successfully migrated
to the new lists.
 * JIRA instance has been setup.

There have been three external releases since incubation started namely
1.5M3, 1.5RC1 and 1.5RC2. We are busy fixing the last remaining issues
before 1.5 final is released. With a stable 1.5 available we will start
migrating the code to Apache repository.

Top priorities:
 * Migrate Click website to Apache.
 * Import issues from existing JIRA.
 * Migrate SVN repository.


= Etch =

Etch was accepted into Incubator on the 2 September 2008. Since then the
following items has been completed;

  * Project STATUS page, navigation and entry in projects/index.html has
been set up.
  * Mailing lists has been set up.
  * Jira project has been set up.
  * ICLAs for all initial committers has been submitted and recorded.

We are still waiting for a CCLA from Cisco, where all initial committers
work. We also track all progress
in JIRA (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INCUBATOR-83) which is a lot
easier than the STATUS page,
and highly recommended for future recommended use to other podlings.


= Tashi =

Tashi has been incubating since September 2008.

The Tashi project aims to build a software infrastructure for
cloud computing on massive internet-scale datasets (what we call
Big Data). The idea is to build a cluster management system
that enables the Big Data that are stored in a cluster/data center
to be accessed, shared, manipulated, and computed on by remote users
in a convenient, efficient, and safe manner.

Mailing lists have been created.

The svn repository was created at
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/tashi

Initial committers' accounts are in process. Mentors have
been given access to the svn repo.

The JIRA project has been created.
https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/project/ViewProject.jspa?pid=12310841


= Imperius =

Imperius has been incubating since November 2007.

Imperius is a rule-based infrastructure management tool.

Code: Development continues on the code base.

Community: Two new committers since the last report. (The CCLA
and ICLAs from Sun contributors have been received and
commit access is now set up for all initial contributors).
One new contributor contributed a patch via JIRA which was
committed.

Graduation is not on the table based on the size and diversity
of the community; and there has not been a release of code.


= JSPWiki =

JSPWiki has been incubating since September 2007.

JSPWiki is a JSP-based wiki program.

During the past three months, the JSPWiki community seems to still enjoy
a steady increase.  The developer list now has 66 names, an increase
of 12%.  The user list is now 152 people strong, a growth of 7% since the
last
report.

The first beta of JSPWiki 2.8 (which is the Apache-licensed version of 2.6)
has been released, and it is missing only a few key patches to be a full
release.
This, however, won't be an Apache release (as it is meant to be backwards
compatible with 2.x series, which means keeping the old package structure).
Despite of this, we're practicing the Apache processes of voting and
approving
releases.

Graduation depends chiefly of three things:

   * Stable release of 2.8, so we can concentrate on 3.0 process
   * Making a successful 3.0 release, including
      * Renaming of all packages to org.apache.*
      * Taking the new API into use
   * Making sure all the legal bits and pieces are in order (i.e. the status
file)


= JSecurity =

JSecurity is a powerful and flexible open-source Java security framework
that cleanly handles authentication, authorization, enterprise session
management and cryptography.

JSecurity has been incubating since June 2008.

Last month, a new external release was issued (0.9.0-RC2).
After this, a single bug fix has been implemented and
committed to the external SourceForge SVN repository.
Many other commits have been made, but all were nonfunctional
and were made to round out the project's JavaDoc.

The JavaDoc is already quite good, but not 100%.  The team has
discussed on the development list that it would be a good idea
to get the JavaDoc completed at 100% before releasing 0.9 final,
with 0.9 final being the last external release.  After this point,
we wanted to inject the code source into the Apache repository
as a 'clean slate' initiative.

The idea is that perhaps 0.9.1 would be an Apache release,
allowing that release to focus only on adherence to Apache
policy and not dependent on code or documentation.  Then all
subsequent releases could benefit from the experience of this
'first run', continuing to maintain Apache policy.

The JavaDoc is currently being updated intermittently, as the
development team has the opportunity to update it in their spare
time.  It is certainly desirable to finish this effort soon,
hopefully no more than a week or two. But this time frame is
ultimately dependent upon the number of contributors.

The project team is not considering graduation at this point,
as the code is not ready for an Apache release. The community
is working well, with decisions being made in public.

The status is being maintained at
http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/jsecurity/STATUS


= Olio =

Olio has been incubating since September 2008.

Olio is a web 2.0 toolkit to help developers evaluate the suitability,
functionality and performance of various web technologies by implementing
a reasonably complex application in several different technologies.

Mailing lists have been created.
http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-1741

The svn repository was created at
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/olio

Initial committers' accounts are in process. Mentors have
been given access to the svn repo.

The JIRA project has been created.
https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/admin/ViewProject.jspa?pid=12310839


= Lucene.Net =

No changes.... still a limping along community with the potential for new
committers on the horizon for quite some time now but no action towards
bringing them on.  There is some vitality to the mailing list, but being a
mostly auto-generated port of Java Lucene does not an excitingly innovative
project make.


= Qpid =

Qpid is an enterprise messaging broker which implements the AMQP protocol.
It has been incubating since 2006-08-27.

News:

   * Oct 08 - Completed our M3 release
   * Sep 08 - Lahiru Gunathilake was voted in as a committer. He contributed
a CLI management tool as part of the GSoC project
   * Sep 08 - Manuel Teira was voted in as a committer. He is working on a
solaris port for the c++ broker
   * Sep 08 - Steve Huston was voted in as a committer. He is working on a
windows port for the c++ broker
   * Two GSoC students, one successfully completed
   * Continuing to attract new contributers.

Issues before graduation:

    * From last board report: PPMC diversity needs to be improved --
Progress, we now have 7 independent entities on the project


Concern:

  It took ~1 month to get a vote on our last release candidate completed,
some on general@ seem happy to pick holes when somethings wrong but seem
uninterested in acknowledging when the issues has been resolved. There was
plenty of activity on other threads, but repeated reminders seemed
ineffectual. This was a bit disappointing.


= RCF =

RCF is a rich component set for JSF which supports AJAX. We are in the
process of analyzing and removing undesired dependencies of our code to be
compliant in the OpenSource world. Incubating since: May 2007.

The project sources have not yet been committed to Apache svn. We have some
internal (oracle) discussion about migration for our existing customers,
since the code-base is already used inside the company.

Issues before graduation:

 * Bring the sources to Apache
 * build a community around the code


= Sanselan =

Sanselan has been in incubation since September 2007.

Sanselan is a pure-java image library for reading and writing
a variety of image formats.

The community hasn't grown much in the past three months. There
continues to be only one active committer.

The first official Apache release occurred on July 30th, 2008.

A second release is being prepared.  It will include significant bug
fixes, better documentation, better IPTC and XMP support and
improvements to the release structure.

Barriers to graduation continue to be diversity, size of the community,
and overall activity.


= Thrift =

DID NOT REPORT


= Tika =

Apache Tika is a toolkit for detecting and extracting metadata and
structured text content from various documents using existing parser
libraries. Tika entered incubation on March 22nd, 2007.

Community

   * Dave Meikle was just voted in as a new committer.
   * Paolo Mottadelli will present Tika at ApacheCon US.

Development

   * Tika 0.2 should be released soon.
   * Usage documentation has been added to the website.

Issues before graduation:

   * The current plan is to graduate as a Lucene subproject, which could
happen soon as the incubation criteria seem to be met.


= UIMA =

UIMA is a component framework for the analysis of unstructured content such
as text, audio and video. UIMA entered incubation on October 3, 2006.

Some recent activity:

    * New Release: Version 2.2.2 of the UIMA-AS (asynchronous scale-out)
framework - this is the initial release of this component
    * New Release: a hot fix for the base 2.2.2 release
    * New Release: the CAS Editor tool
    * Pending release vote in Incubator: UIMA-CPP - the C++ version of the
UIMA framework, allowing C++ components (and components written in PERL,
PYTHON, and TCL) to be intermixed with Java components.
    * CAS Viewer code was accepted into the sandbox, and work is underway to
integrate it with the CAS Editor
    * Pending contribution: a user has integrated Apache Tika as a UIMA
component and is offering to contribute it.
    * IP clearance forms are being worked on for 3 new components being
incorporated into the Sandbox with software grants: A Common Feature
Extractor useful for extracting features from CASes to use as training data
in machine learning algorithms, a Concept Mapper - a general dictionary
style lookup annotator which may be eventually combined with another
dictionary annotator, and a Cas Viewer Eclipse plug-in tool, which may be
combined with the Cas Editor work.

Items to complete before graduation:

    * We still need to attract more new committers with diverse
affiliations.

Community:

    * We continue to do outreach to attract new contributors with diverse
affiliations, who may become committers.


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