Entries tagged [asf]
Statement by The Apache Software Foundation Board of Directors
Posted at 11:48PM Jun 24, 2019
by Sally in General |
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Announcing New ASF Board of Directors
At The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) Members' Meeting held this week, the following individuals were elected to the ASF Board of Directors:
- Rich Bowen
- Shane Curcuru
- Jim Jagielski
- Myrle Krantz
- Daniel Ruggeri
- Craig Russell
- Roman Shaposhnik
- Phil Steitz
- Joan Touzet
Posted at 05:58PM Mar 28, 2019
by Sally in General |
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Apache Software Foundation Platinum Sponsor Profile: Leaseweb
with Robert van der Meulen, Global Product Strategy Lead at Leaseweb
Robert is Global Product Strategy Lead at Leaseweb. Fascinated by technology, Robert studied computer sciences, and after his studies, he delved into the then relatively young and rapidly developing internet technology. He soon understood that the internet would be at the center of almost everything we do and wanted to be part of it. Robert is passionate about using technology to improve people's lives. He contributed to the Debian project as a developer later introduced Apache CloudStack in Leaseweb and has been active in the open source community for quite some time. During his 9 years at Leaseweb, he worked hard to make sure digital transformation, from how we communicate to how we do business, is part of the company mission. Follow @Leaseweb on Twitter.
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"Many Apache projects are being built by – mostly – volunteers and motivated individuals, and the world can use, change and develop all of those. It's important to support the people that make this possible." |
How did Leaseweb's work with Open Source begin?
Support for foundations such as the ASF is important because those foundations are important :-) . Any big open source project at some point needs the infrastructure to continue to run – and it's great if a project can rely on an organization like the ASF for that infrastructure so the focus can be on making the project great. Open source projects can grow and be more successful if they can more easily deal with governance, financials and administration, as well as tangible infrastructure and tools. Helping an organization like the ASF helps the ASF projects all over, which has an impact on the software we use as part of our products.
What sets the ASF apart from other software foundations or consortia?
A number of our leading Cloud products are based on Apache software. We use Apache CloudStack for various private cloud and VPS offerings, and those platforms are continually growing and evolving – and we keep adding more with most of the new locations we open. Along with the CloudStack platforms, hosting environments obviously have many deployments using Apache web servers. Within our technical teams we consume lots of different Apache projects and actively contribute to a number of them (we have a dedicated CloudStack team that includes one of the Apache CloudStack PMC members). Every software solution has its limits, and obviously this goes for CloudStack too – but also we're happy we can change or help change the things that could be better.
It feels great! It's important to, if you have the opportunity, give something back. Many Apache projects are being built by – mostly – volunteers and motivated individuals, and the world can use, change and develop all of those. It's important to support the people that make this possible.
Are there any other thoughts on the experience of being a large-scale donor that you would like to share? What else do we need to know?
Not much. I personally really enjoy seeing what happens with the support we provide – what projects it makes possible, what things it makes more easy or better. Tangible insight in the results is a big motivator as well as a proof point.
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Sponsors of The Apache Software Foundation such as Leaseweb enable the all-volunteer ASF to ensure its 300+ community-driven software products remain available to billions of users around the world at no cost, and to incubate the next generation of Open Source innovations. For more information sponsorship and on ways to support the ASF, visit http://apache.org/foundation/contributing.html .
Posted at 02:04PM Mar 18, 2019
by Sally in SuccessAtApache |
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Success at Apache: For Love or Money: Volunteer vs. Professional Open Source
EDITOR'S NOTE: "Success at Apache" reflects diverse, personal experiences from our community members, with particular focus on the people and processes behind why the ASF "just works". The post below is the result of a discussion with the author that originated in early September 2018 and remained unpublished as its tone deviates from the general tenor of this series.Over the past few months, this topic has increased in visibility and relevance with the greater community, and we have made an exception in publishing due its timeliness and representation of the evolution of Open Source communities, both within and without Apache.
A few weeks ago, a colleague asked me what I believed to be the biggest threat facing Open Source today. I answered that I think it's full-time Open Source developers, and the effect they have on part-time volunteer developers.
Long ago (it actually hasn't been very long, it just seems that way sometimes) Open Source was developed primarily by part-time hobbyist developers, working on their evenings and weekends on things that they were passionate about. Sure, there were full-time developers, but they were in the minority. Those of us working a few hours on the weekends envied them greatly. We wished that we, too, could get paid to do the thing that we love.
Now, 20 years on, the overwhelming majority of Open Source development is done by full-timers, working 9-5 on Open Source software. And those who are working nights and weekends are often made to feel that they are less important than those that are putting in the long hours.
Most of the time, this is unintentional. The full-timers are not intentionally marginalizing the part-timers. It just happens as a result of the time that they're able to put into it.
Imagine, if you will, that you're an "evenings-and-weekends" contributor to a project. You have an idea to add a new feature, and you propose it on the mailing list, as per your project culture. And you start working on it, a couple of hours on Friday evening, and then a few more hours on Saturday morning before you have to mow the lawn and take your kids to gymnastics practice. Then there's the cross country meet, and next thing you know, it's Monday morning, and you're back at work.
All week you think about what you're going to do next weekend.
But, Friday evening comes, and you `git pull`, and, lo and behold, one of the full-timers has taken your starting point, turned it in a new direction, completed the feature, and there's been a new release of the project. All while you were punching the clock on your unrelated job.
This is great for the product, of course. It moves faster. Users get features faster. Releases come out faster.
But, meanwhile, you have been told pretty clearly that your contribution wasn't good enough. Or, at the very least, that it wasn't fast enough.
The Cost of Professionalism
And of course there are lots of other benefits, too. Open Source code, as a whole, is probably better than it used to be, because people have more time to focus. The features are more driven by actual use cases, since there's all sorts of customer feedback that goes into the road map. But the volunteerism that made Open Source work in the first place is getting slowly squelched.
This is happening daily across the Open Source world, and MOST of it is unintentional. People are just doing their jobs, after all.
We are also starting to see places where projects are actively shunning the part timers, because they are not pulling their weight. Indeed, in recent weeks I've been told this explicitly by a prominent developer on a project that I follow. He feels that the part timers are stealing his glory, because they have their names on the list of contributors, but they aren't keeping up with the volume of his contributions.
But, whether or not it is intentional, I worry about what this will do to the culture of open source as a whole. I do not in any way begrudge the full-timers their jobs. It's what I dreamed of for *years* when I was an evenings-and-weekends open source developer, and it's what I have now. I am *thrilled* to be paid to work full time in the Open Source world. But I worry that most new Open Source projects are completely corporate driven, and have none of the passion, the scratch-your-own-itch, and the personal drive with which Open Source began.
While most of the professional Open Source developers I have worked with in my years at Red Hat have been passionate and personally invested in the projects that they work on, there's a certain percentage of them for whom this is just a job. If they were reassigned to some other project tomorrow, they'd switch over with no remorse. And I see this more and more as the years go by. Open Source projects as passion is giving way to developers that are working on whatever their manager has assigned, and have no personal investment whatsoever.
This doesn't in any way mean that they are bad people. Work is honorable.
I just worry about what effect this will have, and what Open Source will look like 20 years from now.
Rich Bowen has been doing open source-y stuff since about 1995, and has been a member of the Apache Software Foundation since 2002. He currently serves on the ASF Board of Directors. By day, he's the CentOS Community Manager, working for Red Hat. Read Rich's earlier post, "Success at Apache: Wearing Small Hats".
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"Success at Apache" is a monthly blog series that focuses on the people and processes behind why the ASF "just works". https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/category/SuccessAtApache
Posted at 03:18PM Feb 05, 2019
by Sally in SuccessAtApache |
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The Apache Software Foundation Welcomes Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its Newest Sponsor
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) today welcomed Amazon Web Services (AWS), the latest company to sponsor the ASF at the Platinum level.
"We are pleased to have AWS as a Platinum Sponsor," said ASF Chairman Phil Steitz. "In addition to helping support the ASF’s day-to-day operations through a Platinum sponsorship, AWS has been a Silver-level Targeted Sponsor providing the ASF Infrastructure team with AWS Cloud credits over the past two years. More than 350 Apache projects and their communities directly benefit from the generosity of ASF Sponsors."
AWS joins the following Sponsors:
Platinum level --Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, Oath, Pineapple Fund, and Tencent;
Gold level --Anonymous, ARM, Bloomberg, Handshake, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, Indeed, Pivotal, and Union Investment;
Silver level --Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Baidu, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cerner, Inspur, ODPi, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, and Target;
Bronze level --Airport Rentals, The Blog Starter, Bookmakers, Cash Store, Casino Bonus, Casino2k, Cloudsoft, Emerio, Footprints Recruiting, HostChecka.com, HostingAdvice.com, HostPapa Web Hosting, The Linux Foundation, Mobile Slots, Mutuo Kredit, Online Holland Casino, RX-M, SCAMS.info, Site Builder Report, Talend, The Best VPN, Twitter, and Web Hosting Secret Revealed.
For more information on becoming a Sponsor of the ASF, please see http://apache.org/foundation/sponsorship.html
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Posted at 05:00PM Jan 28, 2019
by Sally in General |
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Apache Software Foundation Gold Sponsor Profile: Bloomberg
with Kevin Fleming, Head of Open Source Community Engagement and Member of the CTO Office at Bloomberg
Kevin has spent more than 20 years in the technology industry. In 2004, he started a VOIP service provider company and chose Asterisk as his platform. 9 months later he was offered a position at Digium to work on Asterisk full-time. After seven years of developing and managing the Asterisk project, and helping to design and build the Asterisk SCF project, he moved on to Bloomberg LP, where he works with various teams to help produce and support Bloomberg's open software, used by its customers and partners to integrate with the Bloomberg Terminal. Follow @realkpfleming and @TechAtBloomberg on Twitter.
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“ASF's very explicit statement that every participant in a project is participating personally is really a big differentiating factor to the other models.” |
How did Bloomberg's work with Open Source begin?
We're pleased to be able to participate and encourage more companies to sponsor the Apache Software Foundation. Everyone wins when everyone collaborates.
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Sponsors of The Apache Software Foundation such as Bloomberg enable the all-volunteer ASF to ensure its 300+ community-driven software products remain available to billions of users around the world at no cost, and to incubate the next generation of Open Source innovations. For more information sponsorship and on ways to support the ASF, visit http://apache.org/foundation/contributing.html .
Posted at 02:25AM Jan 15, 2019
by Sally in SuccessAtApache |
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Success at Apache: Accidentally Finding Awesome
Posted at 01:16PM Jan 07, 2019
by Sally in SuccessAtApache |
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Apache in 2018 - By The Digits
- Total number of projects + sub-projects - 328 (not including Apache Labs initiatives)
- Top-Level Projects - 198
- Podlings in the Apache Incubator - 51
- Other groups, including operations/support - 62
- Apache Committers - 7,032 (6,693 active)
- ASF Members (individuals) - 730
- New Members elected - 44
3,208 Apache Committers changed 78,493,228 lines of code over 201,220 commits. We also welcomed 4,638 new code contributors and 15,861 new issue/pull request contributors.
Top 5 Apache Code Committers
- Andrea Cosentino (2,508 commits; 237,224 lines changed)
- Jean-Baptiste Onofré (2,098 commits; 1,208,851 lines changed)
- Duo Zhang (1,956 commits; 809,085 lines changed)
- Mark Thomas (1,823 commits; 179,883 lines changed)
- Tilman Hausherr (1,736 commits; 81,940 lines changed)
- Hadoop
- HBase
- Beam
- Camel
- Flink
- OpenOffice (7,822,699)
- NetBeans (7,741,506)
- Flex (whiteboard: 5,233,722; SDK 3,933,522)
- Mynewt (documentation: 4,381.072)
- Hadoop (3,881,797)
- Total number of mailing lists 1,131
- 19,435 authors sent 1,497,005 emails on 505,793 topics
- Flink
- Lucene
- Ignite
- Cassandra
- Kafka
- Beam
- Ignite
- Kafka
- Tomcat
- James
- ICLAs signed - 831
- CCLAs signed - 35
- Software Grants submitted - 25
Thank you to our hundreds of individual donors and Sponsors whose generous support helps offset the ASF's day-to-day operating expenses that include Infrastructure, Accounting, Fundraising, Marketing & Publicity, and more.
- Platinum: Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, Oath, Pineapple Fund, and Tencent Cloud.
- Gold: Anonymous, ARM, Bloomberg, Handshake, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, Indeed, Pivotal, and Union Investment.
- Silver: Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Baidu, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cerner, Inspur, ODPi, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, and Target.
- Bronze: Airport Rentals, Best VPN, The Blog Starter, Bookmakers, Cash Store, Casino Bonus, Casino2k, Cloudsoft, Emerio, Footprints Recruiting, HostChecka.com, HostingAdvice.com, HostPapa Web Hosting, The Linux Foundation, Mobile Slots, Mutuo Kredit AG, Online Holland Casino, RX-M, SCAMS.info, Site Builder Report, Talend, The Best VPN, Twitter, and Web Hosting Secret Revealed.
- Targeted Platinum: DLA Piper, Microsoft, Oath, OSU Open Source Labs, and Sonatype.
- Targeted Gold: Atlassian, The CrytpoFund, Datadog, PhoenixNAP, and Quenda.
- Targeted Silver: Amazon Web Services, HotWax Systems, and Rackspace.
- Targeted Bronze: Bintray, Education Networks of America, Google, Hopsie, No-IP, PagerDuty, Peregrine Computer Consultants Corporation, Sonic.net, SURFnet, and Virtru.
Together, our Members, Committers, contributors, users, supporters, and sponsors continue to build on our mission of providing Open Source software for the public good and are helping keep Apache software accessible to everyone.
Wishing you the best in 2019!
Posted at 07:30AM Jan 01, 2019
by Sally in General |
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Success at Apache: Cookie Monster
by Isabel Drost-Fromm
As a researcher interested in machine learning, Web- and social graphs I joined the Nutch mailing lists back in 2005 when the project was still on SourceForge. I started tinkering with Nutch Writeables to store the data I needed for my analysis – something that today some may know as Hadoop Writeables – the Nutch wiki still has a link to the material that I could get published out of those experiments: https://wiki.apache.org/nutch/AcademicArticles
After leaving academia I remained on the Nutch and Lucene mailing lists - until one day I saw the idea of an "Apache Text" project mentioned: https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/ac22faddbef946b66d544e590fe1b2a54b60215c98cc38a2f995ee06@1176254016@%3Cdev.lucene.apache.org%3E ... I got in touch with Grant Ingersoll, over the course of half a year that vague idea was turned into a plan to have a scalable machine learning project at Apache: Scalable in terms of community, dataset size but also commercially friendly when it comes to licensing – Apache Mahout was created.
Some ideas turn into something with a life on its own. The story I'm going to tell has little to do with great technical or economic achievements that were made with software developed at The Apache Software Foundation. However it has a lot to do with the kind of cross community links that exist between projects at Apache. It also has a lot to do with the fact that there are people active in Apache projects for whom the project is more than merely a day job.
But let's start at the beginning: Little over a year ago, in April or May 2017 Stefan Rudnitzki, one of my then-new colleagues at Europace AG was showing me around the office – mentioning in particular that there's space for meetups of 100 up to 200 people. It was the year when it was unclear whether or not there would be an ApacheCon EU. The combination of those two pieces of information put an interesting idea in our heads: Why not pull ASF interested people to Berlin and have them discuss cross-community, behind-the-scenes, OSS economics, decentralized project management, coordination of work without discretionary power topics?
In a first step we ran a rough version of the idea past a handful of friends at Apache – and received encouragement. The idea got bigger, new aspects were added and we thought "Let's get more specific!".
In a working backwards model the next thing that was written was a press release (in big, bold, red letters marked as "draft, imaginary, DO NOT PUBLISH!!!!!!!") describing a conference on all things open source behind the scenes. The format helped identify important open question marks – like:
- "We don't have a name for the event yet!"
- "We need to decide on a date."
- "We need to come up with a clearer list of topics to cover."
- "What's our target audience?"
- "If this is a full day event – what will we do about catering?"
What helped me personally was having learnt from Sally in her ASF media training what a real press release actually should look like.
As for the name that was found missing in the initial press release draft: After weeks of trying several approaches to come up with a catchy name, I went to pick up my child from kindergarten. What caught my eye was a poster announcing a beneficial concert to collect donations for better equipment and toys – an *a capella* concert: .oO(FOSS A Capella?) .oO(FOSS Backstage?)
The press release formatted version of the vision was first run by Europace – though people here are fairly regularly running after hours meetups, hosting an entire full-day conference is a slightly different scale. After the idea had been met with approval here, it was run by the Apache Community Development mailing list – which we used to keep current planning status transparent and public.
With the idea out in the open it grew beyond something that can easily be run as a small side project. Years ago to create Berlin Buzzwords I had been working together with an event agency called newthinking communications GmbH. They were founded in 2003 by Andreas Gebhard and Markus Beckedahl in the spirit to create a network on the interface between digital technologies and society. Today, the focus lies in the organisation of events such as Berlin Buzzwords and FOSS Backstage as well as content management services (based on Drupal) for NGOs and political parties as well the conferences named above. So I got in touch with newthinking – and was delighted to receive "Sure, we are going to help out" as an answer.
So, what about the cookies? One of the first offers I received after publishing that we were to run a FOSS Backstage full day Micro Summit in November 2017 was: "If you need support with providing cookies for the coffee break – I'm happy to bake some, if there's no more than 40 attendees." Half jokingly I responded that I would add another 40 cookies, lest someone sends me a 3D model of an ASF feather cookie cutter. Lo and behold – the next thing I know is that someone sends me a model file for an ASF cookie cutter (which by now even made it to the then VP trademarks – who was interested in putting it to good use himself). Just a few weeks later I attended Open Source Summit in Prague. Guess what happened? Someone who knew I'd be there brought some printed cookie cutters with him from Australia.
In the meantime we had a one day / two tracks FOSS Backstage Micro Summit in November 2017 kindly hosted by Europace AG. I was able to talk several people into baking ASF cookies (including sugar coatings in the appropriate colours). In addition with the support of both, Newthinking communications GmbH, the ASF planners, and the ASF community development PMC an Apache Roadshow was co-located with the actual FOSS Backstage in June this year – a two day, multiple tracks event featuring Danese Cooper and Shane Coughlan for keynotes, a host of speakers with all sorts of relevant and inspiring stories to share, as well as fishbowl discussions on topics like Open Source monetization. One of the loveliest feedback we received: "This doesn't feel like an inaugural conference, given the professional organisation. You surely did manage to successfully invite people from a great variety of FOSS projects and foundations."
Having a press release draft ready was helpful when starting to drum up interest for the real event: With all details filled in, the "Draft/ Do not share"-warning removed it ended up getting sent to the press and published for real.
We started with a scope of all things FOSS economics, decentralised organisation, cross-cultural team-building, volunteer motivation, licensing and legal. In 2019 we want to align these aspects towards InnerSource, work collaboration principles and modern work models so that teams, companies and organisations can learn from the experiences we all make while working on Open Source projects. We are glad to have the event backed by newthinking GmbH next year again.
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"Success at Apache" is a monthly blog series that focuses on the processes behind why the ASF "just works" https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/category/SuccessAtApache
Posted at 11:41AM Dec 03, 2018
by Sally in SuccessAtApache |
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Success at Apache: Wearing Small Hats
Rich Bowen has been doing open source-y stuff since about 1995, and has been a member of the Apache Software Foundation since 2002. He currently serves on the ASF Board of Directors. By day, he's the CentOS Community Manager, working for Red Hat.
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"Success at Apache" is a monthly blog series that focuses on the processes behind why the ASF "just works" https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/category/SuccessAtApache
Posted at 09:21PM Nov 05, 2018
by Sally in SuccessAtApache |
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Success at Apache: carrying forward the benefits
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"Success at Apache" is a monthly blog series that focuses on the processes behind why the ASF "just works" https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/category/SuccessAtApache
Posted at 09:27PM Oct 01, 2018
by Sally in SuccessAtApache |
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The Apache® Software Foundation Welcomes Tencent as its Newest Sponsor at the Platinum Level
Joins ASF Platinum Sponsors Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, Oath, and Pineapple Fund in supporting the ASF's Mission of Providing Software For the Public Good
Wakefield, MA —20 September 2018— The Apache® Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today sponsorship by Tencent at the Platinum level.
Tencent is the first company from China to become a Platinum Sponsor of the ASF. Numerous individuals employed by Tencent are active contributors to several Apache projects, including Hadoop, HBase, Hive, MXNet (incubating), Parquet, and Spark.
"We are pleased to welcome Tencent, whose generosity, along with that of our other sponsors, offsets our day-to-day operating costs," said ASF Chairman Phil Steitz. "Sponsoring the ASF helps us successfully shepherd more than 300 projects and their communities, mentor dozens of open source innovations in the Apache Incubator, deepen community outreach, and furthers our mission of providing software for the public good 'The Apache Way'."
"We are very proud to join Apache family, as the first Platinum level sponsor from China, after a long time contributing on Open Source projects, include: Hadoop, HBase, Spark, etc.," said Huixing Wang, VP at Tencent Cloud. "Sponsoring ASF is an evidence that Tencent will encourage more talented engineers to join Open Source contributions and innovations, and we firmly believe that Open Source technology can make the world better."
Tencent joins the following ASF Sponsors:
Platinum —Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, Oath, and Pineapple Fund;
Gold —Anonymous, ARM, Bloomberg, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, Indeed, ODPi, Pivotal;
Silver —Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cerner, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Target, Union Investment;
Bronze —Airport Rentals, The Best VPN, The Blog Starter, Bookmakers, Cash Store, Casino Bonus, Casino2k, Cloudsoft, Emerio, HostChecka.com, HostingAdvice.com, HostPapa Web Hosting, The Linux Foundation, Mobile Slots, SCAMS.info, Site Builder Report, Talend, Twitter, Web Hosting Secret Revealed;
Platinum Targeted —DLA Pipser, Microsoft, Oath, OSU Open Source Labs, Sonatype;
Gold Targeted —Atlassian, The CrytpoFund, Datadog, PhoenixNAP, Quenda;
Silver Targeted —Amazon Web Services, Hotwax Systems, Rackspace;
Bronze Targeted —Assembla, Bintray, Education Networks of America, Google, Hopsie, No-IP, PagerDuty, Peregrine Computer Consultants Corporation, Sonic.net, SURFnet, Virtru.
To Sponsor the ASF, visit http://apache.org/foundation/sponsorship.html
About Tencent and Tencent Cloud
Tencent uses technology to enrich the lives of Internet users. Our social products Weixin and QQ link our users to a rich digital content catalogue including games, video, music and books. Our proprietary targeting technology helps advertisers reach out to hundreds of millions of consumers in China. Our infrastructure services including payment, security, cloud and artificial intelligence create differentiated offerings and support our partners’ business growth. Tencent invests heavily in people and innovation, enabling us to evolve with the Internet.Tencent was founded in Shenzhen, China, in 1998. Shares of Tencent (00700.HK) are traded on the Main Board of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong. https://www.tencent.com/
As the subsidiary of Tencent focused on developing cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, Tencent Cloud offers leading technological products and services and customized industry-specific solutions in the fields of cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence to government agencies, corporations and individual developers around the world.
About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than 350 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 700 individual Members and 6,600 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting billions 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 Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Anonymous, ARM, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, Indeed, Inspur, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, Oath, ODPi, Pineapple Fund, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Target, and Union Investment. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF
© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Apache HTTP Server", 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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Posted at 04:01PM Sep 20, 2018
by Sally in General |
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Success at Apache — 赢在 Apache: If it helps others, all the better.
by Sally Khudairi, with contributions by Ignasi Barrera, Von Gosling, Luke Han, Kevin A. McGrail, and Anthony Shaw. Translations by Ted Liu and David Zhenwei Dong.
I became active in The Apache Software Foundation at its inception in 1999. I am responsible for elevating the ASF's visibility, and supporting the Foundation by counseling 350+ Apache projects and their communities in the areas of messaging, outreach, and engagement.
As a global, virtual, and diverse community, the ASF relies on countless Apache Members, Committers, and Contributors to help share our values and explain our processes with others. We have grown from a single project to hundreds of projects and communities https://projects.apache.org/committees.html?date through "The Apache Way": an inclusive process and judicious reinforcement of "Community Over Code".
We launched the "Success at Apache" blog series following the Media & Analyst Training at ApacheCon Seville in 2016. I asked ASF Board Member and VP Brand Management Mark Thomas his opinion on what he thinks are some of the reasons that the ASF "just works". His immediate response was: "project independence". I asked if he'd put that in writing —in his own words— as our community members' personal experiences help others see The Apache Way through their unique perspectives. Shortly afterwards, we published "Project Independence" https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/success_at_apache_project_independence and "Success at Apache" was born https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/feed/entries/atom?cat=SuccessAtApache .
Whilst English is the ASF's official language, localization often helps foster understanding, encourage adoption, and onboard new contributors more quickly. A while back, ASF Member Ted Liu told me that he and some of his coworkers had translated a handful of our "Success at Apache" blog posts into Mandarin Chinese. He asked if it would be useful to us.
Why yes, of course: new approaches to promote and propagate The Apache Way are always appreciated.
. . .
赢在 Apache
- Meritocracy, by Kevin A. McGrail, Vice President of ASF Fundraising. Translation by David Zhenwei Dong.
- Lowering Barriers to Open Innovation, by Luke Han, Vice President of Apache Kylin. Translation by David Zhenwei Dong.
- Scratch Your Own Itch, by Ignasi Barrera, a member of the Apache jclouds PMC. Translation by Ted Liu.
- Contributing to Open Source Even with a High-pressure Job, by Anthony Shaw, contributor to over 20 Open Source projects, including Apache Libcloud. Translation by Ted Liu.
- Open Innovation from a Non-native English Country, by Von Gosling, original co-founder of Apache RocketMQ. Translation by Ted Liu.
. . .
Ted's action reflects one of our greatest successes at Apache: the mindset of "If this is helpful to me, that's good (= "scratch your own itch"). If it helps others, all the better."
After all, we didn't become the world's largest Open Source foundation by not being helpful. There's always something needing to be done in an all-volunteer community: if you'd like to help the ASF, we will happily accept your assistance where possible. Plus, helping others feels pretty great.
Whether contributing code and writing documentation http://apache.org/foundation/getinvolved.html , mentoring community members http://community.apache.org/ , supporting the ASF through an individual donation or corporate sponsorship http://apache.org/foundation/contributing.html , or serving in myriad other ways https://helpwanted.apache.org/ , we thank you.
For an immersive, rewarding experience with dozens of Apache projects and hundreds of user and developer community members, consider joining us at ApacheCon in Montreal 24-27 September 2018 http://apachecon.com/ . This year's event is extra special, as we're celebrating the 20th Anniversary of ApacheCon —huzzah! All are welcome https://blogs.apache.org/comdev/entry/my-first-experience-of-apachecon
We look forward to seeing you there and sharing your Success at Apache.
Sally Khudairi is Vice President of Marketing & Publicity at The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) where, in 2002, she was elected its first female and non-technical Member. Over her 25-year career in the Web, Khudairi has been lauded as a dynamic communications strategist and expert in next-generation innovations, and has played an integral role in building campaigns for some of the industry’s most prominent standards and organizations. Prior to launching the ASF in 1999, Khudairi was deputy to Sir Tim Berners-Lee as Head of Communications at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), overseeing the launch of 17 specifications that include PNG, CSS, HTML4 and XML. She is Managing Director/Luxury & Technology Practice lead at HALO Worldwide and Founder/Chief Marketing Officer at OptDyn.
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"Success at Apache" is a monthly blog series that focuses on the processes behind why the ASF "just works" https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/category/SuccessAtApache
Posted at 02:03AM Sep 05, 2018
by Sally in SuccessAtApache |
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Success at Apache: the Apache Legal Shield - a pragmatic view
by Bertrand Delacretaz
I became active in the ASF in 2001 via Gianugo Rabellino -- he was the one who started the discussions with Apache Fop about me donating the jfor XLS-FO to RTF converter that I had developed earlier. It was already too late to uninvent RTF which is a terrible format, but I digress. I am currently a member of the Board of Directors of the ASF and have been doing a lot of thinking (and presentations) about what makes the ASF tick in terms of collaboration and Shared Neurons.
Section 12.1 of the Apache Bylaws https://www.apache.org/foundation/bylaws describes the legal protection that the Apache Software Foundation provides to our directors, officers and members.
I'm not a lawyer by far, however, and that language is a bit hard for me to parse, so I thought I'd try to clarify what this means for our contributors and learn more about it in the process.
If you go into detail there's certainly more to it but I think the items below are the absolute basics that every PMC member https://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html should understand in order to benefit from the legal shield that the Foundation provides.
What is a "Legal Shield" ?
An important goal of the Apache Bylaws and policies is to isolate our contributors from any legal action that might be taken against the Foundation, if they act as specified in those policies.
That's what we mean by "legal shield": a way for our individual volunters to be sheltered from legal suits directed at the Foundation's projects, as mentioned in our "How the ASF works" document https://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html .
Acts of the Foundation
The first thing is to make sure our software releases are "Acts of the Foundation" as opposed to something that people do in their own name. This is natural if we follow our release policy https://www.apache.org/legal/release-policy.html , which defines a simple release approval process for releasing source code that makes the project's PMC https://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html responsible for the release, as opposed to our individual contributors and release managers.
This means that if the released software is ever involved in legal action and someone has to testify or produce information as part of a subpoena, or worse, it's the Foundation which is in charge of that and not our individual contributors. These things happen from time to time, not very often but they can represent a lot of work and aggravation that none of us are looking for. The 2011 subpoena to Apache around Java and Android http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20110509221136468 is just one example of that. Produce documents reflecting all communications between someone and Apache, how fun is that?
The goal of our release process is to make it very clear what an Apache Release is, and also clarify that anyone using our software in other ways, by getting it directly from our code repositories for example, does so at their own risk. If it's not an Apache Release we didn't give it to them, they grabbed it on their own initiative and have to accept the consequences of that.
The Rest is for Contributors
This leads to a second and related item: developer builds, which happen much more often than releases, often daily, and that people can easily download and use.
Those builds are meant for contributors to our projects, to use in development and testing as part of their contribution activities.
To avoid any confusion, it is important to clearly label them as such, and to draw a clear line between them and official Apache Releases. They should only be advertised in places where developers who are part of our communities (as opposed to the general public) can see them, and with suitable disclaimers.
In our world of continuous deployment and automated builds, the lines between what's a release and what's just tagged code that works for someone are often blurred. That's totally fine from a technical point of view, and often desirable when one wants to move fast, but we shouldn't forget about the possible legal implications ot distributing software.
Let's make sure we take advantage of the well-designed Apache Legal Shield that the Foundation provides to us, by strictly following our release policy and clearly specifying what is what in terms of downloadable software.
I never thought I'd write a blog post on a legal topic, so here's the FUN DISCLAIMER: As mentioned, I am not a lawyer by far, and the above should not be considered legal advice - just a pragmatic view that can hopefully help our contributors better understand the related issues. For legal advice, consult your own legal advisor! And if you're thirsty after reading all this, get a drink and give a toast to the ASF and its founders!
Many thanks to the fellow Apache members who provided feedback and additional ideas for this post.
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Bertrand Delacretaz works as a Principal Scientist with the Adobe Research team in Basel, Switzerland. He spends a good portion of his time advocating and implementing Open Development as a way to make geographically dispersed teams more efficient and more fun for his coworkers. Bertrand is also an active Member of the Apache Software Foundation, currently on his tenth term on the Foundation's Board of Directors (Fiscal Year 2018-2019).
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Posted at 12:21AM Aug 07, 2018
by Sally in SuccessAtApache |
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Success at Apache: The Apache Way for Executives
by Alex Karasulu
I'm a long time member of the Apache Software Foundation and have been an executive officer of several corporations over the course of the past 20 years. I've co-founded several projects in the community and mentored several others.
The "Apache Way" has benefited several aspects of my life, however I never imagined it would help make me a better executive. Even non-technical executives, in organizations totally outside of the realm of technology, can benefit from the Zen of the Apache Way.
Life is hard when you're stupid
I was involved in a number of early dot com startups as an executive, however that was before my involvement with Apache and long before any exposure to the Apache Way. To this day, I remember how opportunistic decisions for short term gains, the lack of collaboration, openness and communication kept causing friction that made my job and ultimately my life much harder than it had to be.
Learning while on the job
Exposure to the philosophy began early even while lurking on mailing lists but picked up more while incubating the Apache Directory Project where I worked with others to grow an active community. Meanwhile, I was the Chief Technology Officer of a large financial services company called Alliance Capital Partners. It was 2002, and the first time I had to conduct myself as a C-Suite executive in an enterprise that was obviously not a technology company. Incidentally, the lack of hands-on coding got me working on a pet project that ultimately became the Apache Directory Server and Apache MINA. The project was medicine to keep me sane and technically up to date. Unbeknownst to me, this would save my career, not as a developer, but as an executive.
The Apache Way makes life easier
The most important and first lesson I learned from the Apache Community was to avoid short term gains that were unsustainable in the long term. This very important core principle derives in part from the concept of "community over code". It does not matter how much code you write, or how good your code is if you cannot get along, compromise, and communicate respectfully with your peers. The code does not write itself, its the community behind it that keeps the code alive. Involving only the most technically proficient contributors should never trump the need to build a sustainable community. I saw projects often suffer from self-centered yet skilled coders added as committers for short term gain at the detriment of a healthy sustainable community. So as a corollary to community over code, avoid short term gains that get in the way of the long term sustainability of an organization's culture. This has immense applications for any executive in both technical and non-technical fields.
While growing my new development organization in this financial services organization, I decided to avoid hiring people that seemed to be very skilled technically but lacked the desire or social skills to collaborate with others. Thanks to experiences at Apache, I could start telling them apart much better than I did before. Also, I was calmer and less anxious when hiring to fill gaps on the team. It was better not to have the resource than to introduce a bad apple onto the team.
This was contrary to how I had operated earlier and started producing great results. The application of this basic principle lead to a solid team that worked better together than ever before in the past. They were able to leverage each others' skills thanks to collaboration to out perform any one skilled developer. This is all thanks to the concept of community over code where social skills, and collaboration were stressed more than technical skills. In the end, being kind, listening, and asking smart questions begets the kind of collaboration needed to build complex software.
Not only did this help with developers, it also worked with teams that did not produce code like project managers under the CTO office. The rule is golden, and IMHO should be applied to any executive's decision making process regardless of the nature of the business or topic at hand.
Inner Source is the Apache Way
Executives drive the architecture and cultural direction of their organizations and the Apache Way provides a solid framework to create healthy foundations through open collaboration, communication and the availability of knowledge for everyone to participate.
Several very successful technology companies have adopted the Apache Way without really realizing they're doing so. In 2000, Tim O'Reilly coined the term Inner Source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_source to apply Open Source principles to any organization. Tim was essentially talking about applying the Apache Way within organizations. The Apache Way has proven itself with companies like IBM, Google, Microsoft, SAP, PayPal and even financial institutions like Capital One which have adopted the Inner Source methodology which is one and the same.
Without going into the details, of which we the Apache Community are intimately aware (using it daily within our projects), I would like to stress how important the approach is for executives outside of Apache to understand. The Apache Way can save organizations from all out disaster, not to mention billions of dollars by impacting the quality of services and products they produce. Again this does not only apply to companies in technological sectors. Capital One a financial services company has also used Open Source methods for internal projects to be extremely successful https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/using-open-source-methods-for-internal-software-projects .
Conclusions
The Apache Way provides several benefits to executives aware of the approach. Executives can directly integrate the principles of the Apache Way into their own thinking to improve their potential for personal success. However the biggest value comes from the cultural framework it produces for the entire organization, however to leverage it in their organizations, executives must be aware of it. The Apache Way has personally helped me grow as an effective executive and it can help others as well. It also provides a compass for how to properly build effective organizations, not only technical ones.
Alex Karasulu is an entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in the software industry and a recognized leader in the Open Source community. He is widely known as the original author of the Apache Directory Server, used by IBM both as the foundation of the Rational Directory Server and also integrated into the Websphere Application Server. Alex co-founded several Apache projects, including MINA, and Felix, among others, which, along with their communities, thrive independently past his day-to-day involvement in the projects. He is the founder of Safehaus, where he authored the first low-resource mobile OTP algorithms in Open Source with the OATH community that was later adopted by Google in their Authenticator product. In addition to IBM, Atlassian, Cisco, and Polycom are just a few of the many companies that sell commercial hardware and software solutions that bundle or embed software and products that Alex has created. Alex holds a BSc. in Computer Science and Physics from Columbia University. He is the founder and co-CEO of OptDyn.
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Posted at 03:32PM Jul 09, 2018
by Sally in SuccessAtApache |
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