Entries tagged [success]
The Apache Way to Sustainable Open Source Success
The Apache Way defines Open Source in terms of both a legal and a social framework for collaboration. It helps others understand what makes Open Source powerful and how participants are expected to behave. In this post we will examine The Apache Way in the context of the Foundation's mission:
"The mission of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is to provide software for the public good. We do this by providing services and support for many like-minded software project communities consisting of individuals who choose to participate in ASF activities."
Let's dissect this mission statement.
"Provide Software for the Public Good"
Key points in this section:
- We produce software that is non-excludable and non-rivalrous
- Use of the software in any context does not reduce its availability to others
- Users and contributors have no committed responsibility to the foundation, our projects or our communities
- Use of a license that conforms to the Open Source Definition is necessary but not sufficient to deliver on our mission
Investopedia defines a public good as "a product that one individual can consume without reducing its availability to another individual, and from which no one is excluded." On the surface, this is a good definition for our use of the term. However, there is a nuance in our use. Our mission is not to produce "public goods" but to "provide software for the public good".
To understand why this is important, one needs to think about what motivates the ASF to produce software that is a public good.
Open Source software can be digitally copied and reused in an unlimited number of ways. Every user can modify it for their specific needs. They can combine it with other software. They can design innovative new products and services using it and can make a living from the proceeds. This is all possible without impacting other people's use of the software. As such, the ASF produces software that can be used for the public good in many different ways.
To allow us to deliver on this part of the mission, it is critical that we adopt a license that uses the law to protect the software curated here at the Foundation. For us that license is the Apache License, Version 2. In addition, we adopt an inbound licensing policy that defines which licenses are allowable on software reused within Apache projects. This policy can be summarized as:
- The license must meet the Open Source Definition (OSD).
- The license, as applied in practice, must not impose significant restrictions beyond those imposed by the Apache License 2.0.
This means that you can be assured that software curated by projects within The Apache Software Foundation is both a public good and for the public good. You can use Apache software for any purpose and you have no responsibility to the Foundation or the project to contribute back (though as addressed in the next section, it is often in your interests to do so).
It is important to recognize that there are software projects out there that adopt our license but do not adopt our inbound licensing policy. Such projects may bring restrictions that are not covered by our license; therefore, it is important to carefully examine the licensing policies of these projects. Using the Apache License alone may not provide you with the same options a Foundation project provides.
Apache projects are successful, in large part, because of our diligence with respect to clearly-defined licensing policies. Such diligence makes it much easier for downstream users to understand what they can and cannot do with Apache software. The Apache License is deliberately permissive to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to participate in Open Source within the ASF or elsewhere. Modifications of our license are allowed, but modified licenses are neither the Apache License nor affiliated with or endorsed by The Apache Software Foundation. No modified license can be represented as such. Modified licenses that use the Apache name are strictly disallowed, as they are both confusing to users and undermine the Apache brand.
While we recognize that there are many ways to license software, whether Open Source or otherwise, we assert that only projects that use both our license (unmodified) and our inbound licensing policy truly follow and adhere to The Apache Way.
While an OSD-approved license and associated policies are necessary for successful Open Source production, they are not sufficient. They provide a legal framework for the production of Open Source, but they do not provide a social framework, which brings us to the second sentence of our mission:
"The mission of the Apache Software Foundation is to provide software for the public good. We do this by providing services and support for many like-minded software project communities of individuals who choose to contribute to Apache projects."
"Like-Minded Software Project Communities of Individuals"
Key points in this section:
- The Apache Way provides a governance model designed to create a social framework for collaboration
- The Apache Software Foundation develops communities, and those communities develop software
- ASF project communities develop and reuse software components that in turn may be reused in products
- Users of ASF software often build products and services using our software components
- Our model, and others like it, have produced some of the largest and longest-lived Open Source projects that have literally revolutionized the industry
There is a lot packed into these few words. It is an understanding of these words that makes the difference between software that is under an Open Source license and software that reaches sustainability through The Apache Way. These words underscore the fact that the Foundation does not directly produce software. That's right, The Apache Software Foundation, with upwards of $8Bn of software code, does not directly produce software. Rather than focus on software, we focus on the creation of and support of collaborative communities; the software is an intentional by-product.
Our like-minded project communities come together because they share common problems that can be addressed in software. As the saying goes, "a problem shared is a problem halved". By bringing together individuals with their unique ideas and skills, we break down barriers to collaboration.
The Apache Way is carefully crafted to create a social structure for collaboration, which complements the legal framework discussed above. Where the legal framework ensures an equal right to use the software, The Apache Way ensures an equal ability to contribute to the software. This is critically important to the long term sustainability of Open Source software projects. This social structure for collaboration is missing from many non-Apache projects, yet a robust social structure is invariably a key component in long-term successful projects outside of the ASF.
The Apache Way is fully inclusive, open, transparent and consensus-based. It promotes vendor neutrality to prevent undue influence (or control) from a single company. It ensures that any individual with a valuable contribution is empowered, and it seeks to assure that a project remains sustainable despite inevitable changes in community membership over time.
Apache projects typically produce software components that can be combined with other software (of any license) in different ways to solve different problems. This provides plenty of opportunity for participants to collaborate within a given software project independent of their relationship outside the Foundation. This is very different from the idea of licensing your product as a whole under an Open Source license. Our model offers more opportunities for reuse which, in turn, increase the pool of individuals likely to contribute to the project.
In addition, our merit-based system seeks to ensure that as people come and go, for whatever reason, there is always someone to take their place. As a result, some ubiquitous Apache projects have existed for over 20 years and helped commercialize the World Wide Web; while dozens of newer projects have defined industry segments such as Big Data and IoT (Internet of Things).
A core tenet of The Apache Way is "Community Over Code", which encapsulates our deep belief that a healthy community is a far higher priority than good code. A strong community can always rectify a problem with the code, whereas an unhealthy community will likely struggle to maintain a codebase in a sustainable manner. Healthy communities ensure the Foundation has the stability to thrive for the next 20 years and beyond. Apache projects do not have the problem of scaling that others, who focus only on the legal frameworks of Open Source, suffer from. If you look around at projects that have grown up alongside the Apache projects, you will see a similar focus on scaling the governance model. This is no accident.
Why this is Important
Software is a critical part of any modern economy. It touches every part of every life in the developed world, and is increasingly transforming everyday life, from womb to grave, everywhere.
At The Apache Software Foundation, we believe that every developer has their personal motivations for building software. We celebrate their right to choose when and how they build their software, including their right to use a non-open license.
We will not dictate what is best for developers or for the software industry.
We care about the provision of software that enables our users, our contributors, and the general public to decide what is best for them.
We welcome you to use our software and contribute to our projects -- or not. It's up to you.
We ask that you leave commercial interests at the door.
Countless organizations are proving that their team members who collaborate in a vendor-neutral environment often apply Open Innovation processes (such as The Apache Way) to their work. This helps create internal efficiencies and lays the groundwork for new external opportunities that may provide additional added benefits.
Bringing only your intention of contributing what best serves the greater Apache community reinforces trust in the people and projects behind the Apache brand, and helps us realize our mission of providing software for the public good.
We learn together and work together to deliver the best software we can.
Apache software is available for all.
The freedom to choose is what makes the Foundation and Apache projects so strong.
Summary
The software industry has changed and continues to change. The ways software is delivered to end users have changed. Some of the leaders in our industry have retired and new leaders have emerged. But some things have not changed. Our model of collaborative software development, through a combination of a licensing and social framework, remains one of the most successful models of software production.
Increasing the number of users, even those who do not contribute to code, should be seen as a benefit, not a problem, in Open Source. More users present an opportunity. At Apache, more users means more success since they are our future contributors.
As a US 501(c)(3) public charitable organization, The Apache Software Foundation helps individuals and organizations understand how Open Source at scale works in a highly competitive market. For more than two decades our focus has not been on producing software, but rather mentoring communities who produce software. The Apache Way advances sustainable Open Source communities: everything we do is Open Source so all kinds of users can benefit from our experience. Apache is for everyone.
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Posted at 01:18PM Mar 19, 2019
by Sally Khudairi 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 Khudairi in SuccessAtApache |
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Success at Apache: Growing with the ASF
by Phil Steitz
I got involved at the ASF in 2002, back in the wild and wooly Apache Jakarta days. In my day job, I was responsible for the team introducing Java technology at a large financial services company.
One of the first things we built was an MVC (model-view-controller) framework for Web applications. We were very proud of it and it worked great in production, but it was hard for us to keep ahead of the feature requests from the many development teams who were using it. One evening, someone said, "Hey, there is this Struts thing that is very similar to what we do and it has some of these things already." I went home and found my way to the Jakarta Web site and downloaded the latest source release.
One thing led to another and the next thing I knew I was asking questions on the struts user mailing list as we started playing with the software and seeing what it would take to convert our apps to use it. After a few months, I found myself answering questions on-list as well and I finally got up the nerve to submit my first patch, which was a documentation fix. At the time, the Apache Struts community was struggling to release version 1.0. I looked around to see what I could do to help and found my way to Apache Commons Pool and DBCP, which Struts was trying to use to replace its built-in connection pool. What I found there was some brilliant but inscrutable code hiding some nasty bugs that Struts needed fixed. At that time, I did not have the Java skills to solve the problems, but I resolved to come back when I did and I watched as others developed workarounds that enabled the Struts community to move forward. I found a welcoming community in Commons and some problems that I could help with. I did eventually make it back to Commons Pool and DBCP, serving as RM for quite a few releases.
During this same timeframe, my $dayjob career was advancing rapidly, thanks in no small part to my aggressive introduction of Open Source software and practices, which was uncommon at the time in financial services. We brought in some ASF committers and their companies to help us build a development pipeline and tooling that was ahead of its time. We applied the Contributor - Committer - PMC member concept to developing enterprise technology standards and strategy. We developed the concept of "earned authority" in technology decision-making, modeled after the idea of publicly earned merit at the ASF. My leadership approach was profoundly influenced by my experience at the ASF, and continues to be to this day. Not a day goes by at work when I do not push for more transparency, more eyeballs on code and more focus on community collaboration and genuine appreciation of diverse viewpoints. I am very grateful to the many ASF community members who have helped me develop as a leader.
Through the years I've met other Apache committers with similar experiences: welcoming projects, friendly communities and great opportunities for personal growth. I’m pleased to see how the ASF has grown and continued to evolve. Every day new contributors join us and new leaders regularly emerge to help guide our communities and the Foundation overall. We all benefit from our experience here and the Foundation becomes stronger as a result.
Phil Steitz is Chairman of the Board of The Apache Software Foundation. He has been an ASF committer since 2003 and a member since 2005. He served for 4 years as Vice President, Apache Commons. Phil also currently serves as Chief Technology officer of Nextiva, a cloud-based business communications company. He has previously held C-level technology leadership positions at multiple software and financial services companies.
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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 09:19PM Mar 05, 2019
by Sally Khudairi 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 Khudairi in SuccessAtApache |
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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 Khudairi in SuccessAtApache |
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Success at Apache: Accidentally Finding Awesome
Posted at 01:16PM Jan 07, 2019
by Sally Khudairi in SuccessAtApache |
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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 Khudairi 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 Khudairi 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 Khudairi in SuccessAtApache |
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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 Khudairi 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 Khudairi 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 Khudairi in SuccessAtApache |
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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.
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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 Khudairi in SuccessAtApache |
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Success at Apache: Dip into the Apache Way
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.
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 Khudairi in SuccessAtApache |
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Success at Apache: Am I there yet? A n00b's perspective
Let me start out by saying that I am not a developer. I do have a technical background, but I hadn't coded in Java for at least 10 years before I got involved in the Apache Drill project. One has to wonder how, as a non-developer, I ended up as a committer for the Drill project. In this blog post, I'd like to share with you how I came to be involved with the Drill project.
But first, why Drill?
I first heard about Drill at an industry conference several years ago. I was speaking with Dr. Ellen Friedman about some data issues we were having and she casually mentioned have I tried Drill? I had not heard of it at that point, so I did some research and it seemed as if Drill could solve a lot of problems that my clients were having. But then, I tried using it and kept getting stuck.
If you aren't familiar with Apache Drill, Drill is an SQL engine which allows you to query any kind of self-describing data. After experimenting with Drill for a while, I was impressed enough to thing that the tool had major potential in security. One of the biggest problems that Drill solves is the need to Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) data into an analytic tool before actually doing analysis of that data. This ETL process adds no value to anything really, and costs large enterprises literally millions of dollars as well as adding unnecessary delays between the time data is ingested and when the data is actually available for analysis. In security applications, this delay directly translates into risk. The longer it takes to make your data available, the more time it will take to potentially find malicious activity and hence, more risk. Therefore, if you're able to query the data without having to do any kind of ETL or ingestion, you are lowering your risk as well as potentially saving millions of dollars.
Getting Involved
Unfortunately, when I started using Drill, I saw this potential, but I couldn't get it to work. My next step from here was to try to get assistance at my company. I pitched the ideas to my company leadership, but it proved very difficult to get the company to pull Java developers from revenue generating projects to work on this "pie-in-the-sky", unproven project. After spending several months on this, I got really frustrated and decided that I was going to try to do it myself, however, I really had no idea what I was doing. I hadn't coded in Java for at least 10 years at the time, and had zero experience with all the modern Java development tools such as Maven and Git. What I did have was persistence, so I started asking for help and decided that I was going to dive right in and start adding the functionality that I felt Drill needed to be useful in security applications. I started working on something that someone else started—the HTTPD format plugin for Drill. Most of the coding was done, but there was still enough there for me to get my hands dirty and start figuring things out.
What I learned
I still would not consider myself a developer, but after getting that particular item committed to the codebase, I learned a lot about how open source projects actually work as well as writing production quality code. Since then, I've tried to add at least one bit of new functionality to each Drill release. I would encourage anyone who is interested in contributing to an Open Source project at the Apache Software Foundation, to dive right in, and start. There are still a lot of ideas I have for Drill, and with time, I hope to have the time to see them through to implementation.
In conclusion, I'm fairly certain that my involvement with Drill and the Apache Software Foundation is really just beginning. I'm currently working on the O'Reilly book about Apache Drill with a fellow Drill committer. It is my hope that the book will spark additional interest in Apache Drill. Open Source software is at the heart of the ongoing data revolution which is dramatically expanding what is possible with data. I firmly believe that Apache Drill will have a role to play in this data revolution and I'm honored to have the opportunity to play a small role in developing Drill.
Charles Givre CISSP is a Lead Data Scientist at Deutsche Bank where he works in the Chief Information Security Office (CISO). Mr. Givre is an active data science instructor and regularly teaches classes about data science and security at various industry conferences, such as BlackHat. Mr. Givre is a committer for the Apache Drill project and together with Mr. Paul Rogers, is working on the forthcoming O’Reilly book about Apache Drill. He can be reached at cgivre(at)apache(dot)org.
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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 11:37PM Apr 10, 2018
by Sally Khudairi in SuccessAtApache |
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