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Tuesday Oct 30, 2012

The Apache Software Foundation Announces ApacheCon Europe Community Edition Officially Sold-Out; Extends CFP for North America Event

Premier Open Source event brings developers and users together to lead communities "The Apache Way", and accelerate success in evaluating, building, adopting, and deploying solutions across the Apache ecosystem.

Forest Hill, MD –30 October 2012– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) today announced key milestones and updates for ApacheCon, its official conference series.

Now in its 13th year, ApacheCon brings users, developers, gurus, students, novices, and enthusiasts together to explore key issues in evaluating, building, and adopting Open Source innovations "The Apache Way". ApacheCon is an ideal opportunity for technologists currently developing Apache-based solutions, as well as those interested in committing code to an Apache project, contributing to the Apache Incubator, or enhancing their Open Source products and community practices. In alignment with the community-driven culture of the ASF, all content for ApacheCon is selected by members of Apache Project Management Committees.

More than 500 delegates will convene at ApacheCon Europe 5-8 November 2012 at the Rhein-Neckar-Arena in Sinsheim, Germany. The sold-out event marks the introduction of the "Community Edition" of ApacheCon --a smaller, less formal event aimed at a more technically-oriented audience, and featuring nearly 140 presentations across 6 tracks, MeetUps, FastFeather and Community Tracks, Hackathon, and BarCamp. The complete schedule is available at http://www.apachecon.eu/schedule/

ApacheCon Europe is underwritten through a generous donation by Platinum Sponsor SAP; Claus von Riegen, Head of Open Source and Open Standards participation, will serve as the conference’s opening plenary speaker. Joining SAP are Gold Sponsors Citrix (co-sponsors of the Cloud Track and sponsors of the event’s wireless connectivity), Google (sponsors of special student registration subsidies), Hortonworks (exclusive sponsors of the Big Data Track), and LucidWorks (exclusive sponsors of the Lucene/Solr & Friends Track and LuceneEurocon, which is co-located with ApacheCon); and Silver Sponsors Cloudant (co-sponsors of the NoSQL Database Track), HP (co-sponsors of the Cloud Track), Optiver (co-sponsors of the NoSQL Database Track), and Oracle (sponsors of the Apache OpenOffice Track); and evening events sponsors Adobe, codeBusters, The Open Bastion, and VMware.

ApacheCon Europe Community Edition is organized and run by the Apache community with assistance from The Open Bastion, producers of ApacheCon North America 2013.

Scheduled to take place 24 February – 2 March 2013, ApacheCon North America will be held at the Portland Hilton in Portland, Oregon, United States. The event will kick off with pre-conference trainings, BarCamp, and hackathon the first two days; followed by the main conference + expo 26-28 February; and closing with post-conference sprints, workshops, and team building events.

The theme for ApacheCon North America is "Open Source Community Leadership Drives Enterprise-Grade Innovation", showcasing the diverse applications and solutions made possible by Apache technologies. Submissions about novel uses of Apache products and how they are helping to shape the future are particularly welcome, including proposals on technical, business and community matters for audiences at all levels from beginner to expert, with particular focus on those demonstrating real-world experience of solving specific problems.

Dozens of Apache technologies—from Abdera to Zookeeper—will be represented across popular topic areas and tracks that include: Apache Daily (everyday tools, frameworks, and components), ApacheEE (Java Enterprise projects at the ASF), Big Data, Enterprise Messaging & Integration, Cloud, Linked Data, Lucene/Solr & Friends (Smart Search & Analytics), Modular Java, NoSQL Database,    OFBiz (Open Source Enterprise Resource Planning), Apache OpenOffice, Web Infrastructure, Business & Community, and many more. To submit a proposal for ApacheCon North America, visit http://na.apachecon.com/

Early-Bird registration will open with the announcement of the conference program at the end of November. Updates will be posted on the @ApacheCon Twitter feed and the ApacheCon Website.

For sponsor and exhibitor information, contact Nancy Asche at acnasponsors@theopenbastion.com or on +1 407 601 6228.

For press/analyst registration and credentialing, or to become a Media Partner, contact Sally Khudairi on +1 617 921 8656 or sk@apache.org.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server — the world’s most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way", more than 400 individual Members and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation’s official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Citrix, Cloudera, Facebook, Go Daddy, Google, HP, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, WANdisco, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "Abdera", "Apache Abdera", "Zookeeper", "Apache Zookeeper" and "ApacheCon" are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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Posted at 12:00PM Oct 30, 2012 by Sally in General  |  Comments[4]  | 

Thursday Oct 18, 2012

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache OpenOffice™ as a Top-Level Project

Award-winning leading Open Source productivity suite widely used in 228 countries; over 20 million downloads of latest version since its release in May 2012

Forest Hill, MD – 18 October 2012 – The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache Open Office has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the Project’s community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

"The graduation of OpenOffice is testament to The Apache Way successfully scaling from incubating 'ingredient brands' to a highly-established end-user product," said ASF Executive Vice President and Apache OpenOffice mentor Ross Gardler. "The incubation process allowed experienced Apache contributors to mentor the project, helping both new and established OpenOffice contributors build an Apache-style community that is both open and diverse."

"The OpenOffice graduation is the official recognition that the project is now able to self-manage not only in technical matters, but also in community issues," said Andrea Pescetti, Vice President of Apache OpenOffice. "The 'Apache Way' and its methods, such as taking every decision in public with total transparency, have allowed the project to attract and successfully engage new volunteers, and to elect an active and diverse Project Management Committee that will be able to guarantee a stable future to Apache OpenOffice."

Initially created by Star Division in the 1990's, the OpenOffice code base was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999 and later Oracle Corporation in 2010, before being submitted to The Apache Software Foundation Incubator in June 2011.

During its development period in the Apache Incubator, the Apache OpenOffice project transitioned nearly 10 million lines of code, added numerous enhancements, and fixed dozens of user-reported bugs in the popular and free productivity suite. In addition, the software received five industry awards, ranging from individual component highlights to top download to best Open Source desktop office productivity application suite.

In May 2012 Apache OpenOffice v3.4 was released in 20 languages, and downloaded over 20 million times by individual, corporate, educational, and government users in 228 countries. Since then, the project has been working on new functionality, innovations, and releases targeted for Q1 and Q4 2013.

"It's really cool that OpenOffice is now a top-level project at Apache," said Juergen Schmidt, Apache OpenOffice Release Manager. "We met many challenges to achieve this milestone: our first Apache OpenOffice 3.4 release required our community to not only transition the code from Oracle repositories to Apache, but also replace incompatibly-licensed libraries in order to successfully meet Apache's licensing requirements. Now our Apache OpenOffice source code is available for the benefit of other projects and organizations."

"We are extremely proud of this important milestone and welcome OpenOffice into our stable of world leading Apache projects," added Gardler.

Availability and Oversight
Apache OpenOffice is available free of charge to any user for any purpose, and may be downloaded from http://openoffice.org. The product can be downloaded on an unlimited number of PCs for an unlimited number of users --completely free of any license fees. The project has a strong focus on open standards support, from ODF (the first implementor of ISO/IEC 26300) to future plans for CMIS, OpenSocial, and OData.

As with all Apache software, Apache OpenOffice software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Information on Apache OpenOffice source code, documentation, mailing lists, related resources, and ways to participate are available at http://openoffice.apache.org/.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server — the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way", more than 400 individual Members and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Citrix, Cloudera, Facebook, Go Daddy, Google, HP, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, WANdisco, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "OpenOffice", "Apache OpenOffice", and "ApacheCon" are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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Posted at 11:00AM Oct 18, 2012 by Sally in General  |  Comments[10]  | 

Tuesday Oct 02, 2012

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Airavata as a Top-Level Project

NSF-seeded Open Source software framework used for executing and managing small to large-scale applications and workflows across local resources, computational grids, and the Cloud.

Forest Hill, MD –-2 October 2012-– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache Airavata has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the Project’s community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

"Being a TLP demonstrates Apache Airavata's commitment to 'The Apache Way' and the project's ability to self-govern, and be a part of the broader ASF community,"  said Chris Mattmann, Vice President of Apache OODT and member of the Apache Tika Project Management Committee. "We are excited to continue working to integrate Apache OODT and Airavata and to work together to leverage Apache Tika for data understanding, classification and extraction in both projects."

Designed to abstract out the complexities in accessing computational resources, Apache Airavata provides API's, sophisticated server-side tools, and graphical user interfaces to construct, execute, control and manage long running applications and workflows on distributed resources including local clusters, supercomputers, national grids, academic and commercial clouds.

"Airavata was initially developed by the National Science Foundation funded collaboration - Linked Environment for Atmospheric Discovery, for creating Cyberinfrastructure systems to enable faster-than-real-time severe weather forecasts" said Suresh Marru, Vice President of Apache Airavata. "Apache Airavata has evolved into a truly open and independent platform created to interface with emerging distributed computing paradigms including High Performance, High Throughput and On-Demand Computing."

The strategy of the Airavata framework is a minimalist architectural design - a conceptually simple to understand modular, componentized software - which is easy to install, maintain and use. This service oriented architecture helps Apache Airavata to blend into diverse software systems. Early adopters of Apache Airavata includes Science Gateways which integrate applications, workflows, data collections with computational resources like Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Additional users include ParamChem, the UltaScan Laboratory Information Management System, the Leadership Class Configuration Interaction Project, and the BioVLab Project.

"Sustainability of science gateways actually can have a very significant impact on science," said Nancy Wilkins-Diehr, co-director of the XSEDE Extended Support for Communities program, which includes gateways that interface to XSEDE resources. "This important leadership in the area of Open Source, community-developed code can be a model for many other scientific software projects. It's the sustainable projects with long-term viability."

Developed on open standards, Apache Airavata is collaboratively supported by individuals from diverse institutes, corporations and non-commercial organizations from around the world. Seeded by code donations from Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute, interest in Apache Airavata continues, and the Project welcomes new participants to its growing community.

"The Airavata project began life as part of the NSF-funded Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery project," explained Marlon Pierce, Principal Investigator on the NSF-funded Open Gateway Computing Environments project and Science Gateway Group Lead at Indiana University. "We worked hard through additional NSF funding of the Open Gateway Computing Environments project to generalize the workflow software to many science (and broader) domains. For us, The Apache Software Foundation represents an important open community model as well as Open Source model for diversely-developed, sustainable scientific software. We hope to convince more in our community to follow suit."

Shahani Markus Weerawarana, Visiting Lecturer at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, added, "With its graduation as a TLP, Apache Airavata is trailblazing a path in science gateways research and development by embracing the 'Apache Way' and thereby ensuring wide international participation of software engineers, scientists, researchers and students." 

Since entering the Apache Incubator in May 2011, the Apache Airavata project has successfully produced several code releases in preparation of its first production-ready, v1.0 release.

Availability and Oversight
Apache Airavata software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Apache Airavata source code, documentation, mailing lists, and related resources are available at http://airavata.apache.org/.

About the Apache Incubator
The Apache Incubator is the entry path for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the efforts at The Apache Software Foundation. All code donations from external organisations and existing external projects wishing to join the ASF enter through the Incubator to: 1) ensure all donations are in accordance with the ASF legal standards; and 2) develop new communities that adhere to our guiding principles. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF. For more information, visit http://incubator.apache.org/.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server — the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way", more than 400 individual Members and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Citrix, Cloudera, Facebook, Go Daddy, Google, HP, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, WANdisco, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "Airavata", "Apache Airavata", and "ApacheCon" are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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Contact:
Sally Khudairi
Vice President
The Apache Software Foundation
press@apache.org
+1 617 921 8656

Posted at 12:00PM Oct 02, 2012 by Sally in General  |   | 

Monday Oct 01, 2012

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Stanbol as a Top-Level Project

European Union-seeded modular Open Source framework enables and extends semantic content management.

Forest Hill, MD – 1 October 2012 – The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache Stanbol has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the Project’s community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

Created to extend traditional content management systems with semantic services, Apache Stanbol offers semantic services for automatic content enhancement, a process where plain text is automatically enriched with meta-data, e.g. about persons, places and organizations, from external data sources. Stanbol’s customized enhancement engines and process chains can be designed for user-specific enhancement tasks, enabling automatic content annotation and linking.

"The graduation also acknowledges the success of Apache Stanbol in bringing semantic technologies and content management communities together," explained Fabian Christ, Vice President of Apache Stanbol.

Providing reusable components that can be used to enhance content automatically is an important step in lifting existing content to a level that makes it more useable for all kinds of tasks, including a better search experience. Adding meta-data to content and linking the content to other existing resources adds the kind of value that could make the difference in many industrial use cases.

"Searchbox is leveraging the Stanbol framework for the Fusepool project as the core framework for processing unstructured and plain text information sources," explained Stéphane Gamard from Searchbox. "Thanks to Stanbol, different information sources can be processed, semantically enhanced and delivered to a front-end web application for an intuitive and advanced user experience."

Initially developed within the European Union's IKS EU Research Project, Stanbol entered the Apache Incubator in November 2010 and was quickly embraced as an ideal framework that makes semantic technologies usable for developers of content management systems. The Project provides a set of predefined enhancement engines including engines for language detection, named entity recognition, and engines for linking entities to linked open data (LOD) sources like DBPedia or geonames.org.

"CELI France, thanks to the integration with Stanbol, we were able to integrate our curriculum vitae (CV) parsing technology with main stream open source document management system, said Luca Dini from CELI.  "Moreover the final user experience was empowered by automatic linking with external LOD sources, which allowed true semantic reasoning over information linguistically extracted from CVs".

"GOSS Interactive demonstrated integration with Apache Stanbol to automatically add semantic mark-up and additional meta-data to managed content while it was still an incubator project," said Gary Ratcliffe from GOSS. "The graduation ensures the availability of Stanbol as a platform on which new semantic services can be developed in the future."

Availability and Oversight
Apache Stanbol software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Apache Stanbol source code, documentation, mailing lists, and related resources are available at http://stanbol.apache.org/. A timeline of the project's history through graduation is also available from the Apache Incubator.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server — the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way", more than 400 individual Members and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Citrix, Cloudera, Facebook, Go Daddy, Google, HP, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, WANdisco, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "Stanbol", "Apache Stanbol", and "ApacheCon" are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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Posted at 12:00PM Oct 01, 2012 by Sally in General  |  Comments[1]  | 

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