Open Source analysis and evaluation toolkit initiated by UCLA and NASA/JPL's Regional Climate Model Evaluation System (RCMES) scientific collaboration; used in regional weather research and global climate dynamics modeling

Forest Hill, MD –03 March 2014– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 170 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that the Apache Open Climate Workbench Project (a.k.a. "Apache Climate" or "Apache OCW") 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.

Apache Climate is a climate evaluation toolkit used to leverage model outputs from organizations such as the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF), the Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX), the U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA), and the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP), coupled with remote sensing data from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and other agencies.

"Collaboration and science go hand in hand so it's great to see NASA, CORDEX, NARCCAP, universities from around the world, and the greater climate science community embracing Open Source and the ASF," said Michael Joyce, Vice President of Apache Climate. "The Open Climate Workbench has had an amazing journey with a great team of contributors and I'm excited to see where it's going."

Originally seeded from the Regional Climate Model Evaluation System (RCMES) code from the Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science and Engineering (JIFRESSE) scientific collaboration between University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the Apache Climate toolkit includes capabilities for data rebinning, metrics computation, and visualization. RCMES now relies extensively on Apache Climate; those members of the global climate community who have been using RCMES prior to its submission to the Apache Incubator in February 2013 have advanced to using RCMES powered by Apache Open Climate Workbench.

Apache Climate features prominently in research applications, with the system used to analyze recent developments in United States and Africa, as well as examine the uncertainty in observed precipitation datasets over the India-Tibet region.

"The Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology are the main the regional climate institution in India related with climate change and impact assessments for India and surrounding regions," explained Jinwon Kim, regional climate modeling lead scientist at JIFRESSE and researcher at the UCLA Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.

"I am using components of Apache OCW in my research to build an application that can identify weather-scaled phenomenon in long-term high resolution satellite (and eventually climate model) datasets," said Kim Whitehall, PhD student in the Howard University Program in Atmospheric Sciences (HUPAS).

Apache Climate is the result of an estimated 24 years of effort (as calculated by the COCOMO – Constructive Cost Model), with nearly 850 commits by 15 individual contributors (representing 94,843 lines of code) during its first year at The Apache Software Foundation.

To manage the massive datasets associated with the metrics, visualizations, and algorithms that support RCMES, Apache Climate is often paired with Apache OODT™ (Object Oriented Data Technology), the Open Source data management system framework originally developed at NASA for information integration and for science data processing and retrieval.

"Leveraging Apache OODT, which was reused on SNPP (Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership) and JPSS (Joint Polar Satellite System) satellite missions, and the Apache open source governance, the OCW is the next step in the development of an integrated climate community research and development environment," explained Dr. Tsengdar Lee, Scientific Computing Portfolio Manager and Weather Data Analysis Program Scientist at the NASA Science Mission Directorate. "It will be developed by the community for the community in a completely open way."

"The community is always looking for good tools to analysis massive amounts of distributed data. It looks like Apache Climate can help in that effort," said Dean Williams, Analytics and Informatics Management Systems project leader at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Principal Investigator of the Earth System Grid Federation.

A demonstration of RCMES powered by Apache Climate is available at http://rcmes.jpl.nasa.gov/training/videos

Availability and Oversight
As with all Apache products, Apache Open Climate Workbench 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. For documentation and ways to become involved with Apache Climate, visit http://climate.apache.org/

Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than one hundred and seventy 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(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Budget Direct, Citrix, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, Pivotal, Produban, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

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Contact:
Sally Khudairi
Vice President
The Apache Software Foundation
pressATapacheDOTorg
+1 617 921 8656

Forest Hill, MD –27 February 2014– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 170 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache Spark 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.

Apache Spark is an Open Source cluster computing framework for fast and flexible large-scale data analysis. Dubbed a "Hadoop Swiss Army knife" by The Register, Spark is recognized for its remarkable speed and ease of use, running programs up to 100x faster than Apache Hadoop MapReduce in memory, and with APIs that allow developers to quickly write applications in Java, Python, or Scala.

"It's great to see Apache become Spark’s permanent home," said Matei Zaharia, Vice President of Apache Spark. "Spark has quickly become one of the most active projects in the Hadoop ecosystem, with dozens of organizations contributing, and we look forward to working closely with the rest of the Apache community."

Initially created in 2009 at the University of California at Berkeley's AMPLab (the research center also responsible for the original development of Apache Mesos), the Spark distributed computing framework for advanced analytics in Apache Hadoop can easily be used standalone or on Hadoop YARN, EC2 or Mesos. Integrated with Apache Hadoop, Spark is well suited for machine learning,  interactive queries, and stream processing, and can read from HDFS, HBase, Cassandra, as well as any Hadoop data source.

"This is a major milestone for the students and researchers in the AMPLab," said Mike Franklin, Director of the AMPLab at UC Berkeley. "Spark demonstrates the real impact that research can have and validates the support AMPLab has received from our White House-announced NSF Expeditions in Computing Award and our 20+ industrial sponsors and collaborators."

"Through our work on Spark at both AMPLab and Databricks, we’ve focused on making it much easier for organizations to get insights from big data," said Ion Stoica, CEO at Databricks and Professor at UC Berkeley. "We're doing this together with a fantastic open source community. We look forward to continue working with the community to accelerate the development and adoption of Apache Spark."

Since entering the Apache Incubator in June 2013, Apache Spark bolstered its community through code contributions by more than 120 developers from 25 organizations. Apache Spark is in use at an array of global corporations that include Alibaba, Cloudera, Databricks, IBM, Intel, and Yahoo, among others.

Andrew Feng, Distinguished Architect at Yahoo, said "Yahoo has played a leading role in evolving Hadoop and related big-data technologies, including Spark. While Apache Hadoop serves as the foundation of our big-data platform, Spark is an attractive technology for iterative applications such as machine learning. Yahoo has made significant contributions to the development of Spark and we congratulate Spark on becoming an Apache top-level project."

"I'm really proud of the community aspect that has become infectious in Apache Spark and that really grew out of the energy in the project starting in the AMP Lab and through its movement to the ASF," said Chris Mattmann, Apache Spark Incubator Mentor at the ASF, and Chief Architect, Instrument and Science Data Systems Section at NASA JPL. "Matei, Patrick, Reynold, and many of the leaders of the project have really done a tremendous job and I'm excited to see the next generation of Hadoop-style systems have a home at the ASF."

"We have some very exciting features coming in the next months, so stay tuned for even more powerful versions of Spark," added Zaharia.

Availability and Oversight
As with all Apache products, Apache Spark 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. For documentation and ways to become involved with Apache Spark, visit http://spark.apache.org/

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than one hundred and seventy 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(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Budget Direct, Citrix, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, Pivotal, Produban, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "Spark", "Apache Spark", 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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Forest Hill, MD –The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 170 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced a "Valentine's Day gift to the Internet" with the release of Apache™ SpamAssassin™ 3.4.0, the award winning and highly extensible email filtering program and API. Named by eWeek as one of the 11 Apache Technologies that have "changed computing in the last 10 years," SpamAssassin is deployed by hundreds of thousands of organizations worldwide who hate spam almost as much as Monty Python. 

By providing a comprehensive set of features and support for email classification including text-based patterns, Bayesian filtering, DNS Blocklists, checksum filters, sender authentication and automated rule channel updates, SpamAssassin takes a multi-step/tiered approach to classifying email to improve accuracy and decrease the chance of legitimate emails being incorrectly identified as spam.  

The project's latest release marks a major milestone more than two years in the making and celebrates a decade with the ASF.  "With the release of SpamAssassin 3.4.0, the project continues battling the ever evolving techniques used by spammers with an enterprise-grade release," said Apache SpamAssassin Vice President Kevin A. McGrail. "The number one feature of SpamAssassin is the proven classification scoring framework that allows system administrators to use new ideas to improve email classification, thereby making SpamAssassin timeless."

Apache SpamAssassin is widely deployed at enterprise organizations around the globe, including national, regional and local ISPs, email service providers, Fortune Global 500 companies as well as small and medium-sized businesses, all levels of the education sector, governments, and private individuals. 

"SpamAssassin is the centerpiece of our anti spam solution at the ASF," said Joseph Schaefer, Senior System Administrator at the Apache Software Foundation. "We receive roughly half a million connections a day, directed primarily at our mailing lists, and manage to remain almost entirely spam free - thanks SpamAssassin!"

The SpamAssassin project provides daily rule updates to fight spam with the project serving over 1 million unique servers with rule updates in just the first month of 2014.  

SpamAssassin has also been the basis for several commercial products and is in use at the core of many commercial offerings of premier email and spam filtering firms including cPanel, the most popular web hosting control panel.  cPanel puts SpamAssassin at the fingertips of tens of thousands of system administrators and millions of end-users giving them "the best solution to obliterate unsolicited email on your server and stay compliant with well-known retention standards," said Eric Ellis, Director of Development Operations for cPanel.

Apache SpamAssassin reflects intensive support from the anti-spam community including development, testing, and research from scores of knowledgeable users to combat spammers.  This release is dedicated to the entire community and their love of fighting spam.

As with all Apache products, Apache SpamAssassin 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 SpamAssassin release notes, source code, documentation, and related resources are available at http://spamassassin.apache.org/.

Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than one hundred and seventy 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(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Budget Direct, Citrix, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, Pivotal, Produban, WANdisco, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "Apache SpamAssassin", "SpamAssassin", 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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The Linux Foundation, Linux Standard Base, MeeGo, OpenDaylight, Tizen and Yocto Project are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. OpenBEL is a trademark of OpenBEL Consortium. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds."Apache", "Apache Cassandra", "Apache Cordova", "Apache CloudStack", "Apache CouchDB", "Apache Geronimo", "Apache Hadoop", "Apache Hive", "Apache HTTP Server", "Apache Lucene", "Apache OpenOffice", "Apache Struts", "Apache Subversion" and "Apache Tomcat", "Cassandra", "Cordova", "CloudStack", "CouchDB", "Geronimo", "Hadoop", "Hive", "HTTP Server", "Lucene", "OpenOffice", "Struts", "Subversion", "Tomcat", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Media Contact

Jennifer Cloer

The Linux Foundation

503-867-2304

Jennifer@linuxfoundation.org

The all-volunteer Apache Software Foundation (ASF) develops, stewards, and incubates over 200 Open Source projects and initiatives, many of which power mission-critical applications in financial services, aerospace, publishing, big data, government, healthcare, research, infrastructure, and more.

Did you know that 50% of the Top 10 downloaded Open Source products are Apache™ projects? Did you know that one of the ASF's most active projects is Apache Marmotta™?

Quick peek: Apache Marmotta is an Open Platform for Linked Data, a paradigm promoted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for large scale data integration across the Web based the RDF technology stack.

Background: Initiated in 2008 by a group of researchers from Salzburg Research as the EU-funded KiWi project (investigated the idea of "Semantic Wikis" and aimed at combining easily editable Web content with Semantic Web technologies to provide data to both human and machine users), later refocused and renamed as LMF. The project was contributed as "Marmotta" to the Apache Incubator in December of 2012. Apache Marmotta graduated as an Apache Top-Level Project in November 2013.

A history of the project is available at http://redlink.co/apache-marmotta/ and http://www.salzburgresearch.at/en/2013/apache-marmotta-graduated-top-level-project/ .

Why Marmotta: Apache Marmotta was created to provide an Open Source implementation of Linked Data technologies in general, and Linked Data Platform in particular. Usually organizations who want to use this technology need to assemble together different pieces of software, with the obvious problems derived, both technical and legal. Apache Marmotta satisfies that need of the industry, supporting almost any use-case with a permissive Open Source license.

Apache Marmotta powers Salzburger Nachrichten's search and archive, the Open Data portal at Enel, as well as Redlink's cloud infrastructure, among other implementations.

What's under the hood: Apache Marmotta includes features that make easier building Linked Data applications, including: full Read-Write Linked Data with basic security mechanism, exchangeable RDF triple stores, SPARQL and LDPath languages for querying, transparent Linked Data caching and an extensible modules architecture where you can plug-in your own modules.

Apache Marmotta comprises the following components:

• The Marmotta Platform, a JavaEE web application providing the Linked Data server;
• KiWi, a Sesame-based triple store built on top of a relational database, including reasoning and versioning;
• LDPath, a path language to navigate across Linked Data resources;
• LDClient, a client that allows retrieval of remote legacy resources not available as Linked Data; and
• LDCache, a cache system that automatically retrieves resources by internally using LDClient

Latest release: Apache Marmotta v3.1.0-incubating on 13 October 2012 under the Apache License v.2.0. More details can be found in the Release Notes.

In the upcoming weeks the Project plans to release its next version --the first one as on official Apache Top-Level Project. Stay tuned via the Apache Marmotta developer, user, and commit lists at http://marmotta.apache.org/mail-lists.html

Downloads, documentation, examples, and more information: visit http://marmotta.apache.org

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In December 2010, The Apache Software Foundation resigned its seat on the JCP Executive Committee. Since then, our access to TCKs that previously had been provided by Oracle to a number of ASF projects has expired.

The ASF has not blocked its projects from having access to JCP-provided TCKs. A number of such TCKs are made available without conditions that affect our ability to release our software under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0; for example, the JSR303 Bean Validation TCK was created by Red Hat/JBoss and is available under the Apache License, version 2.0.

This is not the case with a number of TCKs provided by Oracle.

ASF's position has always been that it would license Java TCKs only if it could do so without incurring any restriction that was incompatible with its license and open source software development and distribution practices. Sun Microsystems originally encouraged ASF to join the Java Community Process Executive Committee with the promise that ASF would have the opportunity to help define the Java Specification Participation Agreement and ensure that it included no such restrictions. Progress was slow, and ASF nearly abandoned the JCP in 2002, but eventually Sun agreed -- in a side-letter modifying the TCK License Agreements -- that the restrictions of concern to ASF would be construed so as not to restrict independent open source implementations:

http://jakarta.apache.org/site/sideletter.pdf

Additionally, the JSPA was modified to 1) prevent the specification lead (then Sun, now Oracle) from restricting the development or distribution of independent implementations and 2) require the specification lead to license essential IP royalty-free to any spec-compatible implementations. With these provisions in place, ASF was comfortable that the TCK licenses and JSPA were compatible with its development processes.

Unfortunately, Sun breached the JSPA in 2006 by licensing the Java SE Compatibility Kit under terms inconsistent with its prior representations to ASF and its obligations under the JSPA, and incompatible with ASF's development of Apache Harmony. ASF urged Sun to honor its agreements, but after Sun persisted in its breach for a year, ASF withdrew from the JCP. At the time, Oracle supported ASF's position that Sun was in breach of the JSPA. But after acquiring Sun, Oracle adopted Sun's policy, disregarding the limits of the JSPA that formed the basis for ASF's participation in the JSP and acceptance of the various TCK licenses.

ASF's position has not changed -- it cannot accept restrictions on TCK-tested code that are incompatible with its license and open source development practices. An example is the requirement in Section 2.1(b)(v) of the Stand-Alone TCK License Agreement, that any software tested with the TCK must thereafter be updated to comply with every subsequent version of the corresponding specification published by Oracle. This provision has always been a part of the TCK License Agreement, but was previously relaxed by an agreement with Oracle's predecessor upon which ASF no longer feels it can rely.

Thus, ASF can only agree to the TCK license if Oracle will amend it consistent with the 2002 side-letter referred to above -- i.e. by removing or reconstruing restrictions that are incompatible with ASF's licensing and development practices -- and to make available under these terms all of the TCKs Apache has previously had access to. We would be eager to work with Oracle on these revisions.

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Forest Hill, MD –16 October 2013– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced Apache™ Hadoop™ 2, the latest version of the Open Source software framework for reliable, scalable, distributed computing.

A foundation of Cloud computing and at the epicenter of "big data" solutions, Apache Hadoop enables data-intensive distributed applications to work with thousands of nodes and exabytes of data. Hadoop enables organizations to more efficiently and cost-effectively store, process, manage and analyze the growing volumes of data being created and collected every day. Apache Hadoop connects thousands of servers to process and analyze data at supercomputing speed.

The project's latest release marks a major milestone more than four years in the making, and has achieved the level of stability and enterprise-readiness to earn the General Availability designation. 

"With the release of stable Hadoop 2, the community celebrates not only an iteration of the software, but an inflection point in the project's development. We believe this platform is capable of supporting new applications and research in large-scale, commodity computing," said Apache Hadoop Vice President Chris Douglas. "The Apache Software Foundation creates the conditions for innovative, community-driven technology like Hadoop to evolve. When that process converges, the result is inspiring."

"Hadoop 2 marks a major evolution of the open source project that has been built collectively by passionate and dedicated developers and committers in the Apache community who are committed to bringing greater usability and stability to the data platform," said Arun C. Murthy, release manager of Apache Hadoop 2 and Founder of Hortonworks Inc. "It has been an honor and pleasure to work with the community and a personal thrill to see our four years of work on YARN finally coming to fruition in the GA of Hadoop 2.  Hadoop is truly becoming a cornerstone of the modern data architecture by enabling organizations to leverage the value of all their data, including capturing net-new data types, to drive innovative new services and applications."

"What started out a few years ago as a scalable batch processing system for Java programmers has now emerged as the kernel of the operating system for big data," said original Hadoop creator and ASF Board member Doug Cutting. "Over a dozen Apache projects integrate with Hadoop, with ten more in the Apache Incubator poised to soon join their ranks."

Dubbed a "Swiss army knife of the 21st century" and named "Innovation of the Year" by the 2011 Media Guardian Innovation Awards, Apache Hadoop is widely deployed at enterprise organizations around the globe, including industry leaders from across the Internet and social networking landscape such as Amazon Web Services, AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, foursquare, HP, LinkedIn, Netflix, The New York Times, Rackspace, and Twitter. Other technology leaders such as Microsoft, IBM, Teradata, SAP have integrated Apache Hadoop into their offerings. Yahoo!, an early pioneer, hosts the world’s largest known Hadoop production environment to date, spanning more than 35,000 nodes.

Apache Hadoop 2 reflects intensive community- development, production experience, extensive testing, and feedback from hundreds of knowledgeable users, data scientists and systems engineers, bringing a highly stable, enterprise-ready release of the fastest-growing big data platform. 

New in Hadoop 2 is the addition of YARN that sits on top of HDFS and serves as a large-scale, distributed operating system for big data applications, enabling multiple applications to run simultaneously for more efficient support of data throughout its entire lifecycle. The culmination of so many other releases in the Hadoop 2.x line, the most current release --2.2.0-- is the first stable release in the 2.x line. Features include support support for:

• Apache Hadoop YARN, a cornerstone of next generation Apache Hadoop, for running both data-processing applications (e.g. Apache Hadoop MapReduce, Apache Storm etc.) and services (e.g. Apache HBase)
• High Availability for Apache Hadoop HDFS
• Federation for Apache Hadoop HDFS for significant scale compared to Apache Hadoop 1.x.
• Binary Compatibility for existing Apache Hadoop MapReduce applications built for Apache Hadoop 1.x. 
• Support for Microsoft Windows. 
• Snapshots for data in Apache Hadoop HDFS. 
• NFS-v3 Access for Apache Hadoop HDFS. 

"The community has stepped up to the challenge of making Hadoop enterprise-ready, hardening the filesystem, providing high availability, adding critical security capabilities,and delivering integrations to enable consolidation of any kind or amount of enterprise data," said Aaron Myers, member of the Apache Hadoop Project Management Committee and Engineer at Cloudera.

"Today, with the announcement of Hadoop 2 and YARN, we've taken another step. Beyond the basic multitenancy customers have enjoyed for the past year, enabling them to mix batch, interactive and real-time workloads, they now have the ability to do so from within a stable foundational part of the Hadoop ecosystem. It's a testament to the community's work that now every distribution of Apache Hadoop will enjoy these benefits, ensuring that customers can deliver the applications they need, on a single Hadoop platform."

"A large portion of the credit for this success is due to Apache's open-source model, which has permitted a wide range of users and vendors to productively collaborate on a platform shared by all," added Cutting.

As with all Apache products, Apache Hadoop 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 Hadoop release notes, source code, documentation, and related resources are available at http://hadoop.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(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Budget Direct, Citrix, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Go Daddy, Google, HP, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, Pivotal, WANdisco, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "Apache Hadoop", "Hadoop", 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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24 July 2013 --Forest Hill, MD-- The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache Mesos 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.

Apache Mesos is a cluster manager that provides efficient resource isolation and sharing across distributed applications, or frameworks. It can run multiple frameworks, including Apache Hadoop, MPI, Hypertable, Jenkins, Storm, and Spark, as well as other applications and custom frameworks.

"It was our goal all along to see Mesos become a kernel of the infrastructure stack of the future," said Benjamin Hindman, Vice President of Apache Mesos. "The project’s graduation from the Apache Incubator is recognition that the software is mature and has brought together a diverse community to sustain it in the future."

Initially created at the University of California at Berkeley's AMPLab (the research center also responsible for the original development of Apache Spark) to manage resource sharing and isolation in data centers, Mesos acts as a layer of abstraction between applications and pools of servers. Mesos helps avoid the necessity of creating separate clusters to run individual frameworks and instead making it possible to optimize how jobs are executed across shared machines.

Whilst in the Apache Incubator, Mesos had four releases, and established an Open Source community according to The Apache Way of governance. Additional improvements to the project includes its flexibility to support several application framework languages, and scalability that has been production tested to thousands of nodes and simulated to tens of thousands of nodes and hundreds of frameworks.

Apache Mesos has proven to be reliable for use in production, and has already been adopted by several organizations for cluster management.

"Mesos is the cornerstone of our elastic compute infrastructure," explained Chris Fry, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Twitter. "It's how we build all our new services and is critical for Twitter's continued success at scale … one of the primary keys to our data infrastructure efficiency."

"We're using Mesos to manage cluster resources for most of our data infrastructure," said Brenden Matthews, Engineer at Airbnb and Apache Mesos Committer. "We run Chronos, Storm, and Hadoop on top of Mesos in order to process petabytes of data." (Chronos is an Airbnb-developed Mesos framework as a replacement for cron, and an example of how custom frameworks can be developed on Mesos to leverage its resource sharing).

"Community support for Apache Mesos is encouraging, particularly as more companies assess how they manage their clusters and look for more efficiency," added Hindman. "Now that we've graduated, we look forward to continuing to grow the number of Mesos adopters and fostering an ecosystem around the project."

As with all Apache products, Apache Mesos 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 Mesos release notes, source code, documentation, and related resources are available at http://mesos.apache.org.

"Apache", "Apache Mesos", "Mesos", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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23 July 2013 --Forest Hill, MD-- The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced the immediate availability of Apache OpenOfficeTM 4.0

Apache OpenOffice is the leading Open Source office document productivity suite, providing six productivity applications: Writer, Calc, Impress, Base, Draw and Formula, with native support for OASIS Open Document Format 1.2 (ODF). OpenOffice supports multiple platforms, including Linux, OS X® and Microsoft Windows®, with additional 3rd party ports to other operating systems. Apache OpenOffice is translated by community volunteers into dozens of languages, including major market languages as well as regional and minority languages that are often ignored by commercial vendors.

More than 58 million copies of Apache OpenOffice v3.4 have been downloaded since its release in May 2012. Apache OpenOffice 4.0 is available for download at: http://www.openoffice.org. 

OpenOffice 4.0 features a new, more modern user interface, improvements to Microsoft Office interoperability, enhanced graphics support and many other improvements, which are detailed in the Release Notes: http://s.apache.org/fw

"With Apache OpenOffice  we are making major improvements to our user experience by introducing the Sidebar, the first radical improvement to the OpenOffice user interface in years," said Andrea Pescetti, Vice President, Apache OpenOffice. "Together with major new improvements in Microsoft Office interoperability, enhancements in graphics and color palette management as well as improvements in Calc, Chart and Draw editor modules, Apache OpenOffice 4.0 adds up to a compelling new release. With a rigorous quality assurance testing process, we wholeheartedly recommend our user community begin to upgrade.  Innovation happens at Apache and is immediately available to everybody who wishes to build upon the OpenOffice source code."

"IBM is proud to see its source code contribution of IBM® Lotus® Symphony™ coming to fruition with the release of Apache OpenOffice 4.0," said Kevin Cavanaugh, Vice President, IBM Collaboration Solutions. "The time is right for wide-scale enterprise adoption, especially with the upcoming end-of-support for Microsoft Office 2003. By choosing Apache OpenOffice, enterprises will free up resources for their cloud and mobile infrastructure investments."

The new Sidebar makes better use of today's widescreen displays. Users may easily edit their document properties in-context, with the most-frequently needed controls available in panels in the Sidebar.  Panels may be expanded or collapsed as needed.  Twenty-two panels were implemented, offering users a major productivity improvement.

A new framework was implemented allowing application developers to build extensions to the Sidebar.  With this new framework Apache OpenOffice 4.0 offers a robust extensibility mechanism, enabling applications that integrate business application data,  seamlessly integrate with cloud and mobile document editing environments, and automate common document workflow tasks. 

Apache OpenOffice Extensions may be downloaded from the new version of the Apache OpenOffice Extension Repository, maintained by SourceForge: http://extensions.openoffice.org

"We at SourceForge are proud to actively support the Apache OpenOffice community", said Alice Hill, President, Slashdot Media. "The new versions of OpenOffice extensions and templates websites provide an enhanced user experience complete with notifications for new versions. We think the Apache OpenOffice community will be thrilled with these upgrades."

Apache OpenOffice provides new Office Open XML (OOXML) support, including support for docx outline levels, support for table background color from table style in docx files, more bullet and numbering support in docx and support for font color in pptx files.

"Microsoft Office interoperability is a very high priority for the project," said Juergen Schmidt, Apache OpenOffice Release Manager. "We are working hard to ensure that our users can successfully exchange documents and document content with colleagues who continue to use Microsoft Office. Moving forward we plan to continue our focus on OOXML document interoperability."

Apache OpenOffice an all volunteer led project. All are welcome to make contributions to any aspect of the project. To get involved visit: http://openoffice.apache.org/get-involved.html

As with all Apache products, 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. Apache OpenOffice release notes, source code, documentation, and related resources are available at http://openoffice.apache.org/.  Follow Apache OpenOffice @ApacheOO on Twitter.

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, VMware, WANdisco, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "Apache OpenOffice", "OpenOffice", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

# # #

18 June 2013 --Forest Hill, MD-- The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced Apache Subversion 1.8.0.

Considered the most popular and widely-used Open Source version control system [1], Subversion was established in 2000 and submitted to the Apache Incubator in 2009. Since graduating as an Apache Top-Level Project in 2010, the Subversion community has continued to focus on meeting the diverse needs of both Open Source developers and worldwide enterprise environments with large data sets and complex branch topologies.

"Version control is a fundamental element of best practices for software development," said Apache Subversion Vice President Greg Stein. "Subversion has experienced tremendous success, becoming the go-to solution for stable, reliable version control for countless development teams.  Version 1.8.0 reinforces our commitment to delivering enterprise-ready functionality with an entry-level learning curve."

"Apache Subversion helps us build tailor-made software for enterprises all around the world," said Damir Deželjin, IT Solutions Architect at ComTrade. "Using a stable, secure, mature, maintainable source control system is of the utmost importance in building upon our 20-year history of successfully delivering projects of all different sizes. We are happy to confirm that our choice to adopt Subversion as a core source control system was the right decision."

Apache Subversion 1.8.0 builds and expands upon the feature provisions of earlier releases to address many of the most commonly requested enhancements.

Since their introduction in prior releases, Subversion’s merge tracking and tree conflict detection features have been critical to its ability to serve projects where branching and merging happens often. The 1.8.0 version improves these features, further automating the client-side merge functionality and improving both tree conflict detection during merge operations and tree conflict resolution during update operations. Additionally, the Subversion client now tracks moves of working copy items as first-class operations, which brings immediate benefit to users today and is a key step toward more thorough system-wide support for moved and renamed objects in a future release.

The release brings improvements which benefit administrators as well.  One of the most common requests made by Subversion administrators has been for a unified mechanism by which to govern client-side configuration settings such as ignore patterns and automatic property definitions.  Subversion 1.8.0 delivers a clean answer to this request via newly introduced support for inheritable configuration-related properties which are stored in the repository itself.

"ADVA Optical Networking's 800+ software engineers collaborate from 10 locations worldwide to deliver innovative networking solutions, and Subversion is an important part of those collaboration activities," said Sridhar Machina, Manager of R&D Source Control. "We are very excited about the 1.8.0 release, and are specifically interested in the administration simplifications promised by the new repository-dictated configuration feature."

Subversion developers also targeted the flat-file repository storage backend (known as "FSFS") for a series of improvements in this release which include revision property caching, revision property file packing, and deltified storage of properties and directory entries lists.  While most of these enhancements aren’t user-visible, administrators will appreciate the increased performance and reduced disk usage they deliver.

"WordPress.org hosts tens of thousands of Subversion repositories that are used and abused in every way imaginable," explained WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. "I'm very much looking forward to seeing how the new storage efficiency saves us space so we can serve our community better."

In addition to new functionality, Subversion 1.8.0 completes the migration away from a dependency on the Neon HTTP library.  The client will now accomplish its HTTP-based network communications solely with the newer Serf library, which provides pipelined and cacheable access to the server, thereby improving performance.

Also, in light of the enhancements made for the newer FSFS repository storage backend and those already planned for future releases, the project has officially deprecated the original BerkeleyDB-based storage backend. The BerkeleyDB storage option will continue to be available and supported, but development efforts going forward will be focused on the FSFS backend.

"We are serious about addressing some long-term and nontrivial feature requests, and in order to do that we need to focus our efforts on a single storage backend," explained C. Michael Pilato, member of the Apache Subversion Project Management Committee. "Moving forward with the backend that is easiest to use and maintain and which is already nearly universally deployed makes sense."

The Subversion 1.8.0 release is the culmination of many months of coding effort, but the design and development effort which resulted in this new version shows no sign of slowing in its wake. The release closely follows a recently held hackathon-style gathering of Subversion developers in Berlin, where participants celebrated the accomplishment and addressed future enhancements and releases. The driving force behind those discussions was the same as when the project was first founded: delivering reliable version control features that address tangible user requirements.

"Apache Subversion has continued to stay relevant and incredibly useful due to our commitment to working with our large community of users, understanding their requirements, and enhancing Subversion to meet those needs. That connection to our community is how we keep our broad base of Subversion users happy," added Stein.

As with all Apache products, Apache Subversion 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 Subversion release notes, source code, documentation, and related resources are available at http://subversion.apache.org/.

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, VMware, WANdisco, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "Apache Subversion", "Subversion", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

[1] http://www.ohloh.net/repositories/compare

# # #

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) held its annual Members' meeting this May. Among the Foundation's business that takes place during this meeting is the election of new ASF Members.

At its inception in 1999, The ASF comprised 21 individuals who oversaw the progress of the Apache HTTP Server. This group formed the Foundation's core membership.

This group grew with "Committers", developers who contributed code, patches, or documentation, and were subsequently granted access by the Membership:

  1) to "commit" or "write" (contribute) directly to the code repository;

  2) the right to vote on community-related decisions; and

  3) and the ability propose an active user for Committership

Those Committers who demonstrate merit in the Foundation’s growth, evolution, and progress are nominated for ASF Membership by existing members. There are currently 468 active Apache Members.

ASF Members are elected bi-annually. New Members elected at the May 2013 Members' meeting are:

Alejandro Abdelnur, Robin Anil, Andrew Bayer, Sergey Beryozkin, Alan M. Carroll, Pei Chen, Chip Childers, Fabian Christ, Luca Cinquini, Dave Cottlehuber, Martin Desruisseaux, Andrew Farris, Adam Fuchs, Reto Bachmann-Gmuer, Daniel Gruno, Alex Harui, Dan Haywood, Sheryl John, Konstantin Kolinko, Christine Koppelt, Jörn Kottmann, Matt Massie, Christian Mueller, David Nalley, Thomas Neidhart, Robert Newson, Ricky Nguyen, Andrea Pescetti, Mark Phippard, Marlon Pierce, Andrew Rist, Henry Saputra, Vinod Kumar Vavilapalli, Andreas Veithen, Nick Wellnhofer, Paul Zimdars.

The complete list of ASF Members and Committers is available at https://people.apache.org/committers-by-project.html#member. For more information on how the ASF works, visit http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html.

# # #

Forest Hill, MD –9 April 2013– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)'s Community Development (ComDev) project today announced its acceptance into the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) as a mentoring organization for the eighth consecutive year.

The ComDev team helps newcomers learn about the ASF's projects, governance, and activities, and guides them in becoming part of the meritocratic, all-volunteer Apache community.

Established in 2005, the Google Summer of Code offers student developers from around the world stipends to write code for various Open Source software projects over a three month period.

The ASF has actively participated in GSoC since the program's inception, mentoring 30-45 students each year, and providing exposure to real-world software and community development "The Apache Way".

Countless GSoC students mentored by the Apache community continue to be long-term code committers on a variety of Apache projects. Some active program participants have even been elected as members of the ASF.

This year, dozens of Apache projects have committed to mentoring GSoC students. They include, but are not limited to, Accumulo, Airavata, Axiom, Bloodhound, CloudStack, CouchDB, Crunch, Giraph, Gora, Hama, Hive, Isis, Jena, Lenya, Lucene, Mahout, ManifoldCF, Mesos, Nutch, ODE, OpenMeetings, OpenOffice, Pig, Rat, SIS, Sling, Solr, Stanbol, Tika, VXQuery, Wookie, XalanJ, and XercesJ. 

The ComDev team recommends GSoC students to discuss ideas directly with all Apache project(s) of interest before the official start of the application phase on Monday, 22 April 2013. The ASF's more than 100 Top-Level Projects and nearly three dozen initiatives in the Apache Incubator are listed at  http://www.apache.org/ and http://incubator.apache.org/ respectively.

For more information on Apache Community Development and to get involved with Apache projects for GSoC, visit http://community.apache.org/gsoc.html

Details on the Google Summer of Code is available at http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2013

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", "Accumulo", "Apache Accumulo", "Airavata", "Apache Airavata", "Axiom", "Apache Axiom", "Bloodhound", "Apache Bloodhound", "CloudStack", "Apache CloudStack", "CouchDB", "Apache CouchDB", "Crunch", "Apache Crunch", "Giraph", "Apache Giraph", "Gora", "Apache Gora", "Hama", "Apache Hama", "Hive", "Apache Hive", "Isis", "Apache Isis", "Jena", "Apache Jena", "Lenya", "Apache Lenya", "Lucene", "Apache Lucene", "Mahout", "Apache Mahout", "ManifoldCF", "Apache ManifoldCF", "Mesos", "Apache Mesos", "Nutch", "Apache Nutch", "ODE", "Apache ODE", "OpenMeetings", "Apache OpenMeetings", "OpenOffice", "Apache OpenOffice", "Pig", "Apache Pig", "Rat", "Apache Rat", "SIS", "Apache SIS", "Sling", "Apache Sling", "Solr", "Apache Solr", "Stanbol", "Apache Stanbol", "Tika", "Apache Tika", "VXQuery", "Apache VXQuery",  "Wookie", "Apache Wookie", "XalanJ", "Apache XalanJ", "XercesJ", "Apache XercesJ",  and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

# # #

Contact:

Sally Khudairi

Vice President

The Apache Software Foundation

press@apache.org

+1 617 921 8656

WHO: The Apache Software Foundation's Apache Struts Project, creators of leading Open Source solutions for creating Java web applications.

WHAT: The Struts™ 1.x Web framework has reached its end-of-life (EOL) and is no longer officially supported.

Created in 2000 to provide an improved development experience over pure Java Server Pages (JSP) utilization, Apache Struts 1 soon became the de-facto standard for Java-based Web application development. Numerous companies world-wide adopted Struts 1 as a strategic platform, even after JSF (Java Server Faces) was introduced as a standardized Java EE framework for Web application development. Its popularity was so prevalent in the early 2000s, most job offerings in the space of Java-based Web technology required Struts 1 as a must-have skill. 

Today, many important Websites and Web-based user interfaces continue to rely on Struts 1 technology. In addition, many popular Web frameworks, such as Spring MVC and WebWork, were significantly inspired by Struts 1.

WHEN: The Apache Struts Project Management Committee is not aware of any urgent issues posing the immediate need to eliminate Struts 1 usage. However, the project's EOL status signifies that security and bug fixes will no longer be provided effective immediately.

The Apache Struts project recommends new projects to be developed using Struts 2 as opposed to Struts 1. While any action-based Java web framework is a potential candidate to re-use Struts 1 architectural experience or migrate existing Struts-1-based applications, users are highly advised to investigate Struts 2 as a successor framework.

WHY: Struts 2 is modern, highly decoupled, feature rich, well maintained, and successfully running in many mission-critical projects globally. It shares the same basic principles with Struts 1, and offers a highly improved architecture, API, and solution portfolio.

WHERE: The last release of Apache Struts 1 is version 1.3.10 from December 2008. All software downloads, notices, and updates are available at the Apache Struts project homepage at http://struts.apache.org/.

NEXT STEPS: The Struts community continues its focus on pushing the Apache Struts 2 framework forward, with as many as 23 releases to date. 

Apache Struts 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 Struts source code, documentation, mailing lists, and related resources are available at http://struts.apache.org/. 

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", "Struts", "Apache Struts", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

# # #

Contact:

Sally Khudairi

Vice President

The Apache Software Foundation

press@apache.org

+1 617 921 8656

Forest Hill, MD –9 April 2013– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache cTAKES 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.

Apache cTAKES (clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System) is an Open Source natural language processing system for information extraction from electronic medical record clinical free-text. Widely used in production by numerous organizations across the healthcare sector, cTAKES was started in 2006 by a team of physicians, computer scientists and software engineers at Mayo Clinic, and was submitted to the Apache Incubator in June 2012. 

Apache cTAKES was built using the Apache UIMA framework and the Apache OpenNLP natural language processing toolkit. Its components are specifically trained for the clinical domain out of diverse manually annotated datasets, and create rich linguistic and semantic annotations that can be utilized by clinical decision support systems and clinical research. 

"As a well-developed NLP tool with a mature codebase, cTAKES is the cornerstone of a variety of use cases in the domain of biomedicine such as phenotype discovery, translational science, pharmacogenomics and pharmacogenetics," said Pei Chen, Vice President of Apache cTAKES. "We are pleased to have proven our adoption of the 'Apache Way', and welcome additional contributors to our growing community."

Apache cTAKES 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 cTAKES source code, documentation, mailing lists, and related resources are available at http://ctakes.apache.org/. 

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 organizations 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/.

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", "cTAKES", "Apache cTAKES", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

# # #

Contact:

Sally Khudairi

Vice President

The Apache Software Foundation

press@apache.org

+1 617 921 8656