The Apache Software Foundation Operations Summary: November 2019 – January 2020

Posted by Sally Foundation

FOUNDATION OPERATIONS SUMMARY

Third Quarter, Fiscal Year 2020 (November 2019 – January 2020)





“The Foundation’s unique approach has created many industry standards and will likely continue to do so for many more years. Apache projects are famous not just for great technology, but for their longevity and vendor-independence.”
—Doug Cutting, ASF Member and Chief Architect at Cloudera (ASF Platinum Sponsor)





> Conferences and Events http://apachecon.com/

During this period we held two major Apache events. Q3 was fairly quiet for Conferences. We did not hold any events during this period, but were busy with early planning happening for several upcoming events.

ApacheCon North America 2020 will be held in New Orleans in September https://www.apachecon.com/acna2020/

We will be holding several Apache Roadshows in the coming months:

Sponsorship opportunities and speaking opportunities are available for all of these events.

> Community Development http://community.apache.org/

One of the key themes this quarter was the discussion of how to encourage ASF participation locally by establishing Apache Local Communities (ALC). The ALC comprises local groups of Apache enthusiasts, called an ‘ALC Chapter’ that will be responsible for organising local Apache related events. To create the necessary oversight for these groups we have agreed a set of governance processes including how they are formed, roles and responsibilities, how events are to be organised and how to dissolve a group if it is no longer active.

We have received the requests to establish the ALC Chapters in Beijing, Warsaw and Budapest and these are currently under consideration. Our existing active ALC Chapter in Indore ran an event on Open Source and ASF Awareness for school students.

We have applied on behalf of the ASF to be a GSoC mentoring organisation for 2020 and are waiting for the response. In preparation we have setup a wiki page to collect GsoC ideas from our Apache project communities.

During January we prepared for participation in FOSDEM as we were once again allocated a booth at the event. Volunteers from many of our projects signed up to spend time on the booth or to make themselves available to talk to attendees. As usual Community Development co-ordinated the booth and managed the giveaways for the event.

As well as ApacheCon and the Apache Roadshows planned for 2020, we are continuing to actively support any third party events that we can.

Despite the holiday season our mailing list traffic has increased slightly this quarter.

> Committers and Contributions http://apache.org/licenses/contributor-agreements.html

Over the past quarter, 1,581 contributors committed 42,338 changes that amount to 14,073,594 lines of code across Apache projects. The top 5 contributors, in order, were: Tilman Hausherr (1,010 commits), Andrea Cosentino (788 commits), Mark Robert Miller (771 commits), Mark Thomas (681 commits), and Jean-Baptiste Onofré (616 commits).

All 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.

During Q3 FY2020, the ASF Secretary processed 187 ICLAs, 6 CCLAs, and 6 Software Grants. History of Apache committer growth can be seen at https://projects.apache.org/timelines.html

> Brand Management http://apache.org/foundation/marks/

Operations —the work of the Brand Management team falls broadly into one of four categories:

– providing advice to projects

– granting permission to use our marks

– trademark transfers and registrations

– addressing potential infringements of our marks

The volume of work this quarter has again increased significantly compared to the previous quarter. This has mostly been driven by starting work on a number of draft policies where we are looking to clarify policy around a number of uses of Apache marks.

The topics covered in the advice provided to projects this quarter included setting up an external package registry, podling naming, community managed sites, registration of marks, ‘official’ social media accounts, assignment of marks, name changes, event sponsorship and linking to external support services.

This quarter has seen requests to use Apache marks for marketing material, events, books, scientifc papers, Websites, t-shirts with nearly all requests being granted, subject to our Trademark Usage Policy. The few requests that are not granted often relate to using a derivtaive of our logos –something we do not permit.

This quarter a number of the event approval discussions resulted in changes to the proposed evenmst dates to avoid clashes with other planned ASF events.

Registrations —the registration of APACHE in the US completed this quarter.

A number of registrations came up for renewal this quarter. We review each renewal as it comes up and, as a result, opted not to renew some of those registrations. The remaining renewals are in now progress.

We also started a small number of new registrations this quarter.

Infringements —potential infringements are brought to our attention from both internal and external sources. The majority of infringements we see are accidental and our project communities are able to resolve these quickly and informally with occasional input from the Brand Management team. A small number of issues take longer to resolve. We made progress on some of these this quarter and hope that that progress will continue next quarter.

We continue to work to resolve the significant infringement mentioned in the last quarterly report. Along side that projects have resolved a number of minor issues during this quarter.

And finally…

The Brand Management team welcomes your comments and suggestions as well as any questions you might have. Please see https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/contact for our contact details.

> Security http://apache.org/security/

We continued to work on handling incoming security issues, keeping projects reminded of their outstanding issues, allocation of CVE names, and other general oversight and advice.

For Q3 we tracked 94 new vulnerability reports across 46 projects. (Q3 last year for comparison was 88 reports). Those reports led to 37 published CVE vulnerabilities.

We published metrics for the whole of 2019 including discussion of high severity issues in a report https://s.apache.org/security2019 

> Privacy http://apache.org/foundation/policies/privacy.html

The board has rekindled the privacy effort. Currently we’re working on three parallel tracks; developing a general policy from which we can derive day to day implementations and operating procedures, capturing/collecting the areas where we know we’ve historically dropped balls while also dealing with the day to day operational aspects (such as requests). The complexity is that we have on the one hand the purpose of the Apache Software Foundation; allowing a community to develop code for the common good. With all that that entails (such as having healthy, transparent and trust in the community). And on the other hands we have the rights and worries of both those in our community and our end users; whose privacy we would like to protect as well as we can. And the two can collide; e.g. for a software grant or things having to do with finance; we need to keep a fair amount of personally identifiable information on file. But at the same time – we want to protect the privacy of our community. Yet for the health of our community – a certain level of transparency is needed; as do some governance processes (e.g. those where developers approve a release as an official release of the foundation). For next two quarters the focus will likely shift to developing SoP’s for day to day implementation (and automation) & hunting down where we have ‘needless’ data.


> Infrastructure http://apache.org/dev/infrastructure.html

This quarter has been relatively quiet for the Infrastructure team, given the holidays and New Year.

Our biggest highlight was hiring Andrew Wetmore as a Technical Writer and Editor, to bring his experience to our set of web pages, wiki content, and assorted documentation. For twenty years, the Foundation has organically written a large number of words. Andrew will corral this set of content into a coherent whole, with two goals in mind: to assist our development community with information about Infrastructure and its services, and to provide better guidance to users and new community members.

Continuing with a reflection of our history, we have decades of email archives. These have been provided on mail-archives.apache.org to the public. This quarter, we finally announced the decommission of our old archive system, in favor of the lists.apache.org service. The archive will be turned off some time during the next quarter, with redirects left in place to handle the myriad of links established over time.

For many years, the Foundation has been investing in CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Development). Primarily through our Jenkins installation, but also through integrations with third-party services. We have begun testing new Jenkins-based tooling to improve our management of clusters of nodes for assignment/use by our projects.

Our hope is this will help us continue to scale with the increasing demands of the Apache communities.

Fundraising is pleased to report another successful quarter of smooth operations. Renewals and business-as-usual work has been executed as planned. We’ve had a “typical” flow of new Sponsors and returning Sponsors with a few exciting Sponsor “upgrades” this quarter. This quarter we also completed our first targeted cash donation to an Apache project (Cordova).

We’re pleased to also report further participation and “cross department” collaboration within The ASF. Fundraising support for Events has remained a focus this quarter as we ramp up for the several 2020 events. Additional focus is being placed on documentation, process, repeatability, and ensuring our Event Sponsors have a smooth experience all around. TAC and Fundraising are also collaborating more to encourage Event participation via Targeted Sponsorships — more to come!

Process-wise, we continue improving the internals of the Fundraising mechanics to ensure smooth operation as well as improved documentation. We’ve recently adopted an improved procedure for meeting minutes and action items to further ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

Our planned outreach activities are all on track for Sponsors and we remain responsive to changes in organizational structures as our contacts enter and depart roles. We enjoyed meeting several of our Sponsors at COSCon in Shanghai in early November. Finally, we also updated our link policy for the “thanks page” to comply with popular webmaster recommendations by adding rel=”sponsored” tags to new links and upon Sponsor renewals.

We are delighted to share the results of a very successful individual giving campaign that ran from late November through the end of calendar year 2019. The proceeds of the campaign were $14,240 in total which represents a 222% increase from previous years! The donations were comprised of 112 individual donations and 3 corporate gifts. We truly felt the love as some donations included heartfelt notes of thanks and encouragement for our mission.

Thank you to all our Sponsors —

  • PLATINUM: Amazon Web Services, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, Pineapple Fund, Verizon Media, Tencent
  • GOLD: Anonymous, ARM, Bloomberg, Handshake, Huawei, IBM, Indeed, Union Investment, Workday
  • SILVER: Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Baidu, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cerner, Inspur, ODPi, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Target
  • BRONZE: Airport Rentals, The Blog Starter, Bookmakers, Cash Store, Bestecasinobonussen.nl, CarGurus, Casino2k, Cloudsoft, The Economic Secretariat, Emerio, Footprints Recruiting, Gundry MD, HostChecka.com, Host Advice, HostingAdvice.com, Journal Review, LeoVegas Indian Online Casino, Mutuo Kredit AG, Online Holland Casino, ProPrivacy, PureVPN, RX-M, SCAMS.info, Site Builder Report, Start a Blog by Ryan Robinson, Talend, The Best VPN, Top10VPN, Twitter, Web Hosting Secret Revealed, Xplenty
  • TARGETED PLATINUM: CloudBees, DLA Piper, JetBrains, Microsoft, OSU Open Source Labs, Sonatype, Verizon Media
  • TARGETED GOLD: Atlassian, The CrytpoFund, Datadog, PhoenixNAP, Quenda
  • TARGETED SILVER: Amazon Web Services, HotWax Systems, Rackspace
  • TARGETED BRONZE: Bintray, Education Networks of America, Google, Hopsie, No-IP, PagerDuty, Peregrine Computer Consultants Corporation, Sonic.net, SURFnet, Virtru

To sponsor The Apache Software Foundation, visit http://apache.org/foundation/sponsorship.html . To make a one-time or monthly recurring donation, please visit https://donate.apache.org/

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Report prepared by Sally Khudairi, Vice President Marketing & Publicity, with contributions by Rich Bowen, Vice President Conferences; Mark Cox, Vice President Security; Sharan Foga, Vice President Community Development; Myrle Krantz, Treasurer; David Nalley, Vice President Infrastructure; Tom Pappas, Vice President Finance; Daniel Ruggeri, Vice President Fundraising; Greg Stein, ASF Infrastructure Administrator; Mark Thomas, Vice President Brand Management; and Dirk-Willem van Gulik, Vice President Data Privacy.

For more information, subscribe to the announce@apache.org mailing list and visit http://www.apache.org/, the ASF Blog at http://blogs.apache.org/, the @TheASF on Twitter, and https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-apache-software-foundation.

(c) The Apache Software Foundation 2020.

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