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Monday March 18, 2019

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.


"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?

There's a long history of open source within Leaseweb. When you do large-scale hosting, open source operating systems, tools, and applications are always pretty much part of your product – and working on open source projects brings mutual benefits. This can mean running a mirror for your customers and "the outside world", fixing and reporting bugs, or helping with actual features or changes to "products" you use. As our services portfolio grew, we started using and contributing to more open source projects, especially when Cloud was becoming a bigger part of the portfolio – bringing the need for more middleware and (platform) management.

Why Apache? How is Leaseweb involved with the ASF, and for how long?

If you count the Apache HTTP Server predating the ASF, we've probably been using ASF software in one way or another for as long as we exist – which is incidentally pretty close to the ASF (we celebrated our 20th anniversary about 2 years ago). Our contributions and use of ASF projects grew significantly when Apache CloudStack became part of the portfolio. CloudStack being open source and managed by the ASF after cloud.com and Citrix adventures gave us a nudge to start using it more. I'd say CloudStack is a significant part of our Cloud portfolio right now – we run large deployments all over the world, often supporting critical customer applications.

Why is support for foundations such as the ASF important? How does helping the ASF help Leaseweb?

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?

The simple distinguishing factor is the size of the ASF. There's a vast number of projects which are part of the ASF, and most of those are significant in the free software "portfolio". Many of those components and projects are used in a less visible way, being part of the hard-core infrastructure of the Internet – but without them, many tools and devices we use would not be able to function. What I like about the ASF, is that it embodies the open source spirit by valuing consensus and being an enabler for the projects that are part of the Foundation. 

What does "The Apache Way" mean to Leaseweb? What makes The Apache Way special?

There's overlap between The Apache Way and the values we try to stick to in Leaseweb. 

Important ones are Merit, Open and Consensus – in part due to our backgrounds. We value facts, deeply dislike assumptions, and like to make decisions based on proper motivation and data. Growth makes people happy and gives great results, so we like people to do more of what they're good at – and to get even better at it. This also means being open to new opinions and ideas – executing on them because they make sense, not because where they come from. I think those values are recognizable in many open source communities as well as in The Apache Way.

Do you have any guidelines for promoting innovation? There is no limit with Open Source: how do you stay focused?

Open source projects are often tools for us or part of a product offering or service – which means we'd look at what tools fit best to get to where we want to be. Innovation is more a natural part of that, as we need it to continue to offer the right services to our markets. It's pretty much impossible to do that without constantly innovating and adding new features and products. Focus is a more difficult one; a large part of that focus is driven by our target markets and customers, so listening to that market and those customers to figure out what they want is super important. That information, along with keeping a close eye on market trends, gives us direction and focus from a product and services perspective. From a more technical angle, great engineers are always looking for ways to make their systems and services better :-) . Lots of input (and obviously the execution!) comes from the product teams – either by constant optimization and small changes, or by bigger business cases or ideas that can be executed. 

How does Apache fit into Leaseweb's long-term strategy/plans?

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. 

Money is just one way to support the ASF. How else do you contribute? What recommendations do you have for others to participate?

An important part of the ASF support is the platform we provide; it's obvious that The Apache Software Foundation would run their infrastructure on Apache CloudStack, but I'm happy the Leaseweb team and infrastructure is delivering and maintaining that particular CloudStack setup. There's a sense of pride; the people building the software are trusting our services to do part of that on. Next to that, it proves to me we provide a set of services and products we can be proud of and one that fits the requirements of a bunch of pretty hardcore Cloud developers.

How does it feel to be able to offer this level of support?

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. 

# # #

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  |   | 

Tuesday February 05, 2019

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.

by Rich Bowen

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".

# # #

"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  |   | 

Monday January 28, 2019

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

# # #

Posted at 05:00PM Jan 28, 2019 by Sally in General  |   | 

Tuesday January 15, 2019

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.


“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?

Bloomberg has been a consumer of Open Source software for decades, but our involvement as a community collaborator and contributor began in earnest about seven years ago. That was a result of a company-wide decision to begin using Open Source tools in the development of our applications and infrastructure when possible, instead of commercial or proprietary tools.

Open Source tools are important to us because, when a tool’s source code is available, you have the flexibility to understand how it works, to modify it, and to support it by yourself, and you don’t have to rely on a vendor who might go away or whose priorities might change. That's not to say that there aren’t vendors who support their Open Source tools, because there are, but we're not locked into a channel model. Open Source tools give us control over our own destiny. If something becomes important enough to us, we can form an internal team to provide support and enhancements for that tool and the team can contribute those enhancements back to the Open Source community, if appropriate.

Why Apache? How is Bloomberg involved with the ASF, and for how long?

Bloomberg has been involved with the ASF for almost all of the seven years that we've been an active participant in the Open Source community. Apache is the home of dozens of Open Source projects that are fundamentally important to us. These tools support our data science workflows, data processing workflows, and web services, as well as other internal and external services that the company operates.

It's important to us that the organization providing a project's home is able to effectively support the project, and we want developers that work on projects in the Apache organization to focus on actually developing software, without having to spend time managing infrastructure (like bug trackers, source code repositories, and related tools). Contributors to Apache projects can focus on their own project because of the support from the foundation that these projects receive.

Why is support for foundations such as the ASF important? How does helping the ASF help Bloomberg?

Supporting organizations like the ASF is important to Bloomberg because of its governance model. Every participant in one of these Open Source projects has equal representation and footing, and developers are valued based on the merits of their contribution. Projects operating under a different governance model might not offer same type of participation for developers unless their company has made a significant financial contribution to the organization. Bloomberg participates in those types of organizations as well, but we strongly prefer those that allow everyone to participate. Not only can input come from a broader community, but also this allows contributors with a varied level of experience to participate in projects.

Contributors on these projects aren't only developers; they also include people with varied skills like documentation, project management, and marketing. Sometimes a project's decision-makers don’t write any code. While useful tools are developed within both governance models, the way an Apache project's roadmap is set, planned, and decided upon is what's important to us.

What sets the ASF apart from other software foundations or consortia?

The one really significant difference from other charitable foundations that we also support is the ASF's governance model. ASF's very explicit statement that every participant in a project is participating personally is really a big differentiating factor to the other models. 

What does 'The Apache Way' mean to Bloomberg? What makes 'The Apache Way' special?

As a result, meetings held to discuss the next major phase of an Apache project's development don't feel like any company has a representative group. ASF's policy states that you're there representing your own personal interests and not anyone else's. Even though I may know where everyone in the room works, it doesn’t matter and is not relevant. That doesn’t mean you can't say 'the company I work for uses this piece of software in a certain way,' and obviously the way you use the software will impact your opinion, but you don’t make suggestions because that’s what your company wants. Your decisions about a project should be influenced by what you think is best for the broader community. A contributor's entire currency is based on their contributions and how the community values their participation.

Do you have any guidelines for promoting innovation? There is no limit with Open Source: how do you stay focused?

We often have to consider different solutions because of changing business requirements, new types of systems to manage, or some other reason. We strongly encourage people to take a few steps back from their daily work of maintaining our systems to think about what the service may need to support in the future. We want to know if we're using the right tool, if we should use something else, or if we should improve an existing tool.

We strongly encourage people to consider that they're not just delivering a service today and that they don't want that service to be irrelevant to clients six months down the road. They need to build applications and provide databases and services that have the right functionality that meet our clients' present needs. But, you also have to choose solutions that can grow with you and that you can grow, and you have to be able to take technology in the direction you need it to go. You can do this with Open Source easier than you can with a commercial, off-the-shelf solution.

How does Apache fit into Bloomberg's long-term strategy/plans?

It's strategically important to us to ensure that the ASF continues to be a place where new, interesting, and exciting Open Source projects want to go to as their home. As these projects evolve beyond just a few people putting code up on GitHub, they can receive the benefits and support that ASF has to offer – this is a good thing for Bloomberg and the greater Open Source community.

Money is just one way to support the ASF. How else do you contribute? What recommendations do you have for others to participate?

We participate in helping the ASF decide how best to support organizations like us, and we look for ways to further help the ASF through regular conversations with them. We help spread the word about how Apache projects are run and why that's valuable and important – marketing and evangelizing is another way we contribute to the overall health of the community and the projects to which our developers contribute.

There are a few different models for how people can contribute to Apache projects. We have some employees who contribute outside of work, in their personal time. On the other end of the spectrum, we have staff that spend most of their day working on Open Source projects, including reviewing patches that aren't contributed by Bloomberg employees. These Open Source projects are important to Bloomberg, and this work ensures that the projects move forward. Of course we also have team members who contribute to projects as the need arises, which may mean that they contribute to a dozen (or more) projects in any given year.

We also host collaborative weekend sprints that are focused on a specific Open Source project or group of projects. Between 50 and 100 people attend these events with project leaders so they can learn how to become contributors to that specific project, and we provide the support system so they can participate. We ask people to break up into teams so they can, while working as part of a small group, tackle open items on the project's 'to do' list. The groups dive in and try to figure out how to solve each problem, and experts are available to help when people get stuck or to merge participants' PRs on the spot.

For some of those attending, this may be their initial contribution experience, and it's important that this experience is very collaborative, friendly, and productive. The goal of these events is to train people to be Open Source contributors. While the sprint might not be for an Apache project, some participants end up contributing to Apache projects in the future. Once someone becomes a contributor, they become more comfortable with the process and know what to expect, and they're able to translate that experience to subsequent projects.

How does it feel to be able to offer this level of support?

We're pleased to be able to participate and encourage more companies to sponsor the Apache Software Foundation. Everyone wins when everyone collaborates.

# # #

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  |   | 

Monday January 07, 2019

Success at Apache: Accidentally Finding Awesome

by Daniel Ruggeri

My involvement with the ASF started very simply. 

I was a server administrator who wanted to have a bug or two fixed and a feature or two added to the Apache HTTP Server (httpd). I spent some time learning the codebase a bit and submitted my first patch to the httpd dev list. I wasn't expecting much of a response, as my primary motivation was to avoid having to maintain the fixes locally, but I was willing to do it if I had to. Surprisingly enough, I got a quick response from "those developer folks" and was thanked for the contribution and given a bit of guidance on when it might hit the stable branch. Wow... cool: that was neat. 

Fast forward a few months and I found a few other bugs and even added a few features myself. Every time, "those folks" (who I certainly wasn't a part of because I just wasn't as brilliant) took the contribution and incorporated it into the code base or gave pointers on how to improve it. This was getting to be pretty cool, but I was convinced "they" were just happy for the free labor.

Around that time, I was hitting some serious career growth. Working with httpd so much at $dayjob, I got to the point where I knew the ins and outs of the proxy quite well. I was also challenged by a mentor to consider giving public talks. After mulling over it, I figured I'd give it a shot and since 98% of $dayjob revolved around the httpd proxy and cool things you could do with it, I submitted a talk to ApacheCon. Again, thinking "Maybe 'those folks' don't have a full schedule" and are seeking content.

Amazingly, "those folks" accepted the talk. I gave my first *real* public speech at ApacheCon. I remember it vividly: I was nervous as hell. I mean... could you believe it? The PRESIDENT/one of the founders of the ASF was in the audience. The guy that WROTE THE MANUAL AND BOOK about httpd was also sitting right there. Oh, by the way, the guy that WROTE THE BOOK about modules was across the aisle a few rows back. Not to mention the fact that I saw several name tags I recognized as 'heavy hitters' in the community. I couldn't believe it, but they actually took the time out of their day to hear what I had to say.

While I think the presentation was probably "OK" at best, I was still welcomed and even got to chat with "those folks" about the future of the project and where it might be taken. I also got to chat with folks from several other projects. I heard about this "Hadoop" thing from a newfound friend (didn't make much sense to me) and enjoyed some awesome meals with folks from other projects (I didn't even come close to understanding what they did, but wrote down the names for later research). I connected with a fellow server admin who had some cool ideas for httpd and spent some time brainstorming how to make our @dayjobs better. 

I learned so many things in that first year at ApacheCon. 

Not too long afterwards, I was invited to be a committer on the httpd project. This floored me because, for the first time, I realized that this wasn't about sucking up free patches from the outside world. I started to see that the project was interested in me being part of it.

So, off I went. I continued submitting ever-more-interesting patches here and there, going to ApacheCons and giving ever-more-refined versions of my proxy talk and spending ever-more-time with other folks in the community. I did this really cool "barcamp" thing where we talked about whatever we wanted and got to expand our minds. 

There was also something about making the terrible (wonderful?) mistake of buying the first round the last night of the ‘con once, too: shenanigans all around. 

After a while, I didn't feel like just an outsider trying to run a better server at $dayjob. I felt like I was part of this bigger thing that was going on. I was hanging out with people I genuinely consider friends as opposed to "those folks". I was loving it and I wanted to share it. So I did the unthinkable... in a moment of boldness or temporary insanity enhanced by a faulty governor that avoids embarrassment, I gave a completely ad-hoc lightning talk titled "I love this community." And at that point... the cat was out of the bag and I was effectively 'all in'.

The really cool thing is that I wasn't actively trying to join the community. Heck, I didn't even realize a community was there. Instead the community was actually pulling me toward it. I had no idea what the *depth* and *richness* of where things would go. I started as an outsider with zero expectation other than making my life a bit easier at work and stumbled upon one of the most rewarding things I've found outside of blood family.

... THIS is why I love this community and THIS is why I want to serve it. So, as it follows, this is where the pride comes from. With a family this welcoming, it makes it easy to become more involved. So… the only thought to leave you with is “How are YOU going to get move involved?”

Daniel Ruggeri is an Open Source evangelist and lover of tech. At work, he is responsible for setting the direction of the Web and Cloud space for Mastercard and he spends his time playing with infrastructure and the code that powers it both inside the firewall and outside. He is a member of The ASF and has contributed code to Open Source projects from simple pet projects to widely utilized servers. As a lover of Open Source, he even teaches courses about Open Source Software Development (and will share the curriculum with you!).

# # #

"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 01:16PM Jan 07, 2019 by Sally in SuccessAtApache  |   | 

Tuesday January 01, 2019

Apache in 2018 - By The Digits

It's been a great year for the Apache community at-large. With nearly 200M lines of code under the ASF's stewardship, our ongoing success is the result of community-led development "The Apache Way", executed through the collaborative efforts of more than 300 Apache projects and their communities. Highlights include:

Apache Projects —https://projects.apache.org/
  • 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

Community/People —http://home.apache.org/
  • Apache Committers - 7,032 (6,693 active)
  • ASF Members (individuals) - 730
  • New Members elected - 44

Apache Projects/Code —https://projects.apache.org/statistics.html

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 

  1. Andrea Cosentino (2,508 commits; 237,224 lines changed)
  2. Jean-Baptiste Onofré (2,098 commits; 1,208,851 lines changed)
  3. Duo Zhang (1,956 commits; 809,085 lines changed)
  4. Mark Thomas (1,823 commits; 179,883 lines changed)
  5. Tilman Hausherr (1,736 commits; 81,940 lines changed)

Top 5 Apache Project Repositories by Commits
  1. Hadoop
  2. HBase
  3. Beam
  4. Camel
  5. Flink
Top 5 Apache Project Repositories by Size (Lines of Code)
  1. OpenOffice (7,822,699)
  2. NetBeans (7,741,506)
  3. Flex (whiteboard: 5,233,722; SDK 3,933,522)
  4. Mynewt (documentation: 4,381.072)
  5. Hadoop (3,881,797)

"If it didn't happen on-list, it didn't happen." —https://lists.apache.org/
  • Total number of mailing lists 1,131
  • 19,435 authors sent 1,497,005 emails on 505,793 topics
Top 5 most active Apache user@ mailing lists
  1. Flink
  2. Lucene
  3. Ignite
  4. Cassandra
  5. Kafka
Top 5 most active Apache dev@ mailing lists
  1. Beam
  2. Ignite
  3. Kafka
  4. Tomcat
  5. James

Contributor License Agreements and Software Grants —https://www.apache.org/licenses/

We welcomed an average of 387 new code contributors and 1,250 new people filing issues each month. Individuals who are granted write access to the Apache repositories must submit an Individual Contributor License Agreement (ICLA). Corporations that have assigned employees to work on Apache projects as part of an employment agreement may sign a Corporate CLA (CCLA) for contributing intellectual property via the corporation. Individuals or corporations donating a body of existing software or documentation to one of the Apache projects need to execute a formal Software Grant Agreement (SGA) with the ASF. 
  • ICLAs signed - 831
  • CCLAs signed - 35
  • Software Grants submitted - 25

Sponsorship and Individual Support —http://apache.org/foundation/contributing.html

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.

ASF Targeted Sponsors provide the Foundation with contributions for specific activities or programs.
  • 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!

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Posted at 07:30AM Jan 01, 2019 by Sally in General  |   | 

Monday December 03, 2018

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.


Isabel Drost-Fromm is (currently board-) member of the Apache Software Foundation, co-founder of Apache Mahout and mentored several incubating projects. Interested in all things search and text mining with a thorough background in open source project management and open collaboration she is working Europace AG as Open Source Strategist. True to the nature of people living in Berlin she loves having friends fly in for a brief visit –- as a result she co-founded and is still one the creative heads behind both, Berlin Buzzwords, a tech conference on all things search, scale and storage as well as FOSS Backstage, a conference on all things Free and Open Source behind the scenes and how it interrelates with business and InnerSource.

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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  |   | 

Monday November 05, 2018

Success at Apache: Wearing Small Hats

by Rich Bowen

Within The Apache Software Foundation, many of us have different roles. I am a committer on the Apache httpd project, and also a PMC member on that project. I am the Vice President, Conferences. I am a board member. And I’m a member of the Foundation. I'm also an employee of Red Hat, and may, at times, be perceived to be speaking for my employer.

I am a father, husband, brother, son, employee, and so on. How I interact with my daughter is very different from how I interact with my manager. I use different language, wield different authority, and expect different results.


Ten years ago at ApacheCon in Oakland, Bertrand Delacretaz gave a talk about hats. We all laughed a lot. But he was making a serious point. At the Apache Software Foundation –indeed, in life– we all wear many different hats.

However, whereas it's pretty clear, in real life, whether I’m addressing my daughter or my manager, on Apache mailing lists it's seldom, if ever, clear which hat I'm wearing in any given situation.

I like to operate on the following principle when communicating in the Apache community: Wear the smallest hat possible for the situation, but assume that everyone is seeing the biggest hat possible.

So, what does that mean?

In the list above of my Apache hats (Committer, PMC Member, Foundation Member, V.P. Conferences, Director), there are various levels of authority. As a project committer, I can make code changes, but as a PMC member, I can reject other people’s changes. As a Foundation Member, I can express an opinion, but as a Director, I can state the official position of the Foundation.

The difficulty comes when, on a mailing list, I say something, intending it to be my personal opinion (i.e., Foundation Member hat) and someone reads it as the official position of the Foundation (i.e., Foundation Director hat).

Thus, in any given situation, I have an obligation to wield the smallest stick I possibly can, appropriate to the situation. Also, to clearly communicate how I am speaking, if there’s any chance of confusion, by saying things like "speaking as a member, and expressing my private opinion …", or "It is the opinion of the Board of Directors that …"  And, since there’s always a chance of confusion, due to many factors, it’s worthwhile to make this clarification almost every time, if you’re in a position where you do, in fact, wear multiple hats.

By wearing the smallest hat possible –i.e., speaking with the voice with the least authority– you allow other people to be free to express their own dissenting opinions without feeling that they have already been overruled. This is in line with our culture of providing a level playing field, where all voices are equal, and all opinions are weighed the same.

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  |   | 

Monday October 01, 2018

Success at Apache: carrying forward the benefits

by Mikael Ståldal

Back in 2013, I worked as software developer and architect at a small IT company. We needed a logging framework for the Java based server platform we were developing. Initially, we tried to use the java.util.logging framework built in to the Java platform. But we soon realized that it was insufficient for our needs.

Looking for alternatives, I found Apache Log4j 1.2 and Logback 1.0. I was not very impressed with either of them, and a bit frustrated with the fragmentation of logging frameworks for Java.

Then I discovered Apache Log4j 2, which was still in beta, but looked promising and I decided to try it out. It worked well for us, and I decided to get involved to improve and contribute to it. I hoped that it once will become the standard logging framework for the Java platform.

We used Graylog to aggregate and analyze log events, and I developed a plugin for Log4j 2 to make it easier to integrate with Graylog. This plugin, GelfLayout, was contributed to the project and became part of Log4j 2. Then I got invited to be committer in the Log4j 2 project.

2015 I got a new job at another IT company. We also needed a Java based logging framework, and I introduced Log4j 2. We found the plugin I had developed at the previous job useful. Later, I developed another plugin for our needs, KafkaAppender, and contributed it to the project. Then I got invited to the Apache Logging PMC (as a committer September 2015, and later member of the Project Management Committee June 2016).

So, thanks to open source and the Apache Software Foundation, I was able to develop a software component when working for one employer, and then continue to use it at my next employer.

How can you do this yourself? Most likely you already use some open source software at work, and there are probably cases where it can be changed to fit your needs better. Make use of your right to make changes, and consider contribute them upstream if they constitute generic improvements. That will benefit the larger community by improving widespread software. It will also benefit the company you work for since they will get less maintenance burden when never versions are released. And finally it will benefit your future self when you work for another company using the same open source software. Read more about how to contribute to an Apache open source project here: http://apache.org/foundation/getinvolved.html


Mikael Ståldal works as software developer, developing mostly in Java and Scala. He has worked at various IT companies in Stockholm. Mikael is also committer and PMC member of the Apache Logging Services project.

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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  |   | 

Thursday September 20, 2018

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  |   | 

Wednesday September 05, 2018

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  |   | 

Tuesday August 07, 2018

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.

. . . 

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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"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 12:21AM Aug 07, 2018 by Sally in SuccessAtApache  |   | 

Monday July 09, 2018

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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"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 03:32PM Jul 09, 2018 by Sally in SuccessAtApache  |   | 

Monday June 04, 2018

Success at Apache: the Chance to Influence the World

by Weiwei Yang

I submitted my first patch to Apache Hadoop in 2015, a very simple bug fix with just a few lines of changes. However the feeling is still vivid to me when the patch was accepted, I felt great accomplishment. It was not about how big the change was, but rather because I knew even a small change would help a lot of people. This is the best thing I like about working in Open Source, the work I've done has the chance to influence the world. 

As of today, I have contributed nearly 200 patches to Apache Hadoop, over 20k lines of code. I still feel happy when the community accepts my patches. I believe that having such passion is an essential for an individual contributor to make the way to Apache. Unless your company paid you to work on Open Source, you must find yourself such accomplishment during the work, otherwise the commitment won't last. Like me, I spent over 3 years until I received commit privileges for Hadoop. In retrospect, it was a tough, challenging but fast growth journey. I am glad I did not give up and finally get where I am now.

If you are hired by a commercial company that sells products or services powered by Open Source software, then congratulations, you are on a shortcut to Apache. Such companies usually have a strong team working directly on Open Source projects and a lot of committers. Being a member of such organization, you will have more time working on the project, get faster feedback of your patches, opportunities to participate more discussions and much deeper involvement. Unfortunately, I was not working for such companies. Moreover, my native language is not English and I have a big timezone gap with the majority people from the community. That makes my path to Apache much more difficult. I believe there are many people, just like me at 3 years ago, who are willing to contribute but finding it hard to. In this post, I will share some tips how to work with the Apache community and how to grow up to a committer.

First, it's important that you know things that are public to everyone. Every Open Source project has its own tutorials introducing how to contribute, be sure you have read that before working on any patches. Those documents generally tell you how to contribute code in the "Apache" way, and how to collaborate with the community.

Second, don't mind fixing bugs. Actually I suggest to begin with fixing bugs. You may find bugs in your daily work, or somebody reported to the community. No matter if they are big or not, bugs must be fixed so that it's easier to get attention from the community. In an Open Source community, everyone volunteers to review some other ones' patches. So don't be upset if nobody gets to your patch quickly, try to soft ping committers around this area. But never push them for anything. And always be polite.

More involvement. There are many ways to get more involvement. First, if a community sets up a MeetUp once in a while, try to attend even you are remote or in an inconvenient local time. Such MeetUps can help you gather information of the development status, current community focus etc. It also helps others to get familiar with your face; second, try to participate in more discussions. This could be discussions on mailing lists, issue tracking systems or a Web conference that discusses a particular issue/design. In my opinion, this is the hardest part especially for contributors from overseas.

Be self-motivated and passionate. Nobody forces you to work on Open Source projects, you need to keep motivating yourself. Like I first mentioned in this post, there are more ways to be self-motivated than just feeling accomplished. Working in the community gives you the chance to work in a diverse environment, meet people from different companies and different countries; you can get as many chances as you want to solve difficult real problems, and improve your skills; you can build your reputation in the community which also helps your career development.

I truly hope my experiences would help people. Now I am working at Alibaba Group, and it gives me more reason to write this post. I see a lot of talented people around, they have solid skills, they have done and are doing a lot work to make Hadoop better. They are open to contributing back but are having various of difficulties to work with the community. I am committed to helping grow this community, and I do believe an open and diverse community will help the project thrive.  


Weiwei Yang is a Staff Engineer working at Alibaba Group. He has been working on Big Data area for over 8 years, most of time working on Apache Hadoop. He contributed to several Apache projects such as YARN, HDFS, MapReduce, Ambari and Slider, and an active Hadoop committer. At present, he is working in Alibaba’s data infrastructure team and is focusing on evolving Apache YARN to support mixed workloads, improve performance and cluster utilization. Prior to that, he worked in IBM for several years and won multiple Open Source contribution awards.

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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

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Posted at 10:05AM Jun 04, 2018 by Sally in SuccessAtApache  |   | 

Monday May 07, 2018

Success at Apache: Dip into the Apache Way

by Nick Couchman

Like other recent contributors to this blog, I am not a developer by trade. My day job is as a Linux Systems Engineer and team manager, and, truth be told, my programming skills are not something I would rely on to make a living. Despite these facts, I've found something beyond acceptance in being a part of the Apache Guacamole project: mentoring.

Most of my experience with The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has been with retrieving the Apache Web Server (httpd) http://httpd.apache.org/ from the download page, and getting involved with the ASF was more accidental than anything else. I've brushed arms with the Guacamole project http://guacamole.apache.org/ at several times over the past decade. As a systems administrator/engineer, and one who prefers Linux to some of the commercial alternatives, I'm always happy to see software produced that is truly cross-platform, and, as many current trends are demonstrating, Web browser applications are the pinnacle of cross-platform applications. I used Guacamole in various applications in my place of employment, but always saw opportunities to improve it – add a feature here or there, make it more administrator or user friendly, etc.

After a recent job change, I found myself with a little more free time than I had previously had, and a desire to do something productive with that time. I started thinking about how I could give back to the Open Source community – I've long been a user of many software packages made freely-available to the world, and my appreciation for the developers and companies that produce and support these efforts had, for a while, made me want to do something to return the favor and give back to that community. I also needed to challenge myself and fill some of my free time, and growing my programming skills seemed like a good way to accomplish these goals.

When I settled on Guacamole, I found that it had entered into the Apache Incubator http://incubator.apache.org/ programming in an effort to get the project accepted by The Apache Software Foundation. I thought that was cool, but didn’t think much else of it at the time, and I knew little about the organization. The Incubator program helps potential ASF projects learn how to create a certain culture and community that encourages development and interaction.

This culture is created, in large part, by the Apache Way, a set of guiding principles and behaviors for projects within the ASF. One of the biggest keys to my success, thus far, in contributing to the Guacamole project is the concept of mentoring – not a behavior or principle officially outlined in Apache Way documents, but rather a byproduct of those principles. It seems that it is very human to be dismissive of people that don't measure up to our standard in some way or another, and my programming skills are, by far, the weakest of any of the current contributors to the Guacamole project. However, instead of ridicule or dismissal or discouragement, the other developers within the project have been accepting, helpful, and provided guidance.

And, as with any good education opportunity, they don't do this by giving me the answers or telling me how to do something, they do it by providing examples, references, and pointers that help me to think through the why and make my way to the how to write better code. The result? I still wouldn't rely on my programming skills for my day job, but I've come a long way in the 18 months that I've been a part of the project, and the code I write today is better than when I started.

Finally, this involvement actually makes me better at my day job. Not only does it give me a stronger appreciation for the effort that goes into writing the software that I use on a regular basis, but, more practically, it gives me a stronger set of skills for debugging problems and tracking down bugs that occur. I'm better able to locate the actual cause of problems, provide useful descriptions of those problems, and interact with the software engineers and developers in various places responsible for writing, improving, and supporting those applications.

At this point, my involvement with The Apache Software Foundation is limited to the Guacamole project, and will probably stay that way for the foreseeable future, but it's great to be involved with an organization and community that has a very diverse community of developers and projects, and know that, should I choose to add another challenge to my life, there are other projects out there that would welcome the involvement and would provide similarly positive experiences in helping me grow in my ability to give back to the open source community. If you're itching to dust off or learn some programming skills then I encourage you to look at the many available Apache Software Foundation projects available and jump into one of the communities. You'll almost certainly want to join one of the mailing lists for the project and your involvement can grow from there.

Nick Couchman is a Senior Linux Systems Engineer and Technical Team Lead for a major cosmetics conglomerate, and spends his days trying to convince everyone that they should run more Linux and less...other stuff.  He spends his evenings with his family and increasingly small amounts of free time contributing to the Apache Guacamole project, learning how to write C, Java, and JavaScript.

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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

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Posted at 10:59AM May 07, 2018 by Sally in SuccessAtApache  |   | 

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