The Apache Software Foundation Blog

Tuesday December 12, 2017

Success at Apache: What a Long Strange (and Great) Trip It's Been

By Jim Jagielski

It is normally during this time of year that people get awful retrospective. We look over the last 12 months and come to terms with what kind of year it has been. We congratulate ourselves on the good and (hopefully) learn from the bad. We basically assess the ending year and start planning, even a little bit, on the one to come.

In general, we reminisce.

I am thinking not about 2017, however, but instead of 1995 and the origins of The Apache Software Foundation. And what a long, strange, and great trip it's been. And how incredibly lucky I've been to be a part of it.

A common saying is that success is mostly about being there at the right place at the right time, and although I'm not sure about the "success" part, it certainly applies to me. At the time I was working at NASA and was starting off a side business as an ISP and Web Hoster, and using the old NCSA web-server. I had created a small reputation for myself as an "expert" on a flavor of UNIX called A/UX, which was Apple's UNIX offering at the time. In addition to being the editor of the FAQ for A/UX, I also ported a bunch of "free software" to that platform and that's how I got started with Apache, providing patches to support A/UX, which is what I used as my web hosting platform. It was really no different than what I did for other software projects at the time.

And then something wonderful happened. I got hooked.

I really, really enjoyed the people I was collaborating with. I wasn't an "outsider" providing patches, I was part of the inner circle. I was a full fledged member of the Apache Group. I started to really understand just how all this really could change the world, and how I could maybe be a small part of it.

As a result, Apache changed my life, literally. Instead of doing software development as a way of "getting my job done" (at NASA, I was a power system engineer, and so I would code modeling and simulation software for spacecraft solar arrays, batteries and orbital mechanics), I starting doing software development as my job, in addition to my hobby. Apache and Open Source became a huge part of my life, and my career changed to focus on Open Source almost primarily, a change that continues to this day.

During this time I've been fortunate enough to work with, and learn from, extremely talented people. Not only related to code, but legal matters, inter-personal skills, presentation skills, etc. I've had opportunities that I never imagined and met people I never would have had expected otherwise. I'm made great friends. I've been mentored by incredibly giving people and have mentored in return. And have seen my mentees become mentors themselves.

Over the years, I've seen Apache grow from a rag-tagged group of people working on a web server to one of the leading Open Source foundations in the world with more than 300 projects under our belt. I've been blessed to serve on the board of the ASF for every single year since we incorporated in 1999, seeing 2nd and now 3rd "generation" Apache Members take on the reins.

The Open Source movement, and especially Apache, have given more to me than I could ever pay back, and that is why I still volunteer and contribute. Of course, to be honest, I still get a kick out of it, and love what I am doing, and continue to enjoy the opportunities and, especially, the people that I get to work with.

But, you see, I'm nothing special. All this is also open and available to you. You too can change the world, and have your world changed in return. We all have talents that can be shared, talents that can be recognized and rewarded. Apache is a family, always looking for new family members. 

So take that first step. Find a project and community you want to a part of. Jump in. Have fun. Grow. Learn. Teach. Live.

But just be prepared to get hooked, and have your life change.


Jim Jagielski is a well known and acknowledged expert and visionary in Open Source, an accomplished coder, and frequent engaging presenter on all things Open, Web and Cloud related. As a developer, he’s made substantial code contributions to just about every core technology behind the Internet and Web and in 2012 was awarded the O’Reilly Open Source Award and in 2015 received the Innovation Luminary Award from the EU. He is likely best known as one of the developers and co-founders of the Apache Software Foundation, where he has previously served as both Chairman and President and where he’s been on the Board Of Directors since day one. Currently he is Vice-Chairman. He's served as President of the Outercurve Foundation and was also a director of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Up until recently, he worked at Capital One as a Sr. Director in the Tech Fellows program. He credits his wife Eileen in keeping him sane. 

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"Success at Apache" is a monthly blog series that focuses on the processes behind why the ASF "just works". 1) Project Independence https://s.apache.org/CE0V 2) All Carrot and No Stick https://s.apache.org/ykoG 3) Asynchronous Decision Making https://s.apache.org/PMvk 4) Rule of the Makers https://s.apache.org/yFgQ 5) JFDI --the unconditional love of contributors https://s.apache.org/4pjM 6) Meritocracy and Me https://s.apache.org/tQQh 7) Learning to Build a Stronger Community https://s.apache.org/x9Be 8) Meritocracy. https://s.apache.org/DiEo 9) Lowering Barriers to Open Innovation https://s.apache.org/dAlg 10) Scratch your own itch. https://s.apache.org/Apah 11) What a Long Strange (and Great) Trip It's Been https://s.apache.org/gVuN

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Friday December 08, 2017

The Apache News Round-up: week ending 8 December 2017

Hello, Friday! This week the Apache Community has been working on:

Support Apache –Corporate Giving programs often have end-of-year philanthropic goals: if your employer has a Matching Gifts program, please consider adding The Apache Software Foundation to your list of beneficiary organizations to increase your donations and their tax deduction. Every dollar counts. http://apache.org/foundation/contributing.html

ASF Board –management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws.
 - Next Board Meeting: 20 December. Board calendar and minutes http://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html
 - The Apache Software Foundation Operations Summary: August - October 2017 https://s.apache.org/j1GJ

ASF Infrastructure –our distributed team on three continents keeps the ASF's infrastructure running around the clock.
 - 7M+ weekly checks yield smashing performance at 99.88% uptime http://status.apache.org/

ASF Operations Factoid –this week, 91 Apache contributors changed 98,334 lines of code over 433 commits. Top 5 contributors, in order, are: Attila Doroszlai, Mark Thomas, Antoine Duprat, Wenchen Fan, and Francesco Chicchiriccò.

Apache HttpComponents™ Client –a library for client-side HTTP communication.
 - HttpComponents Client 4.5.4 GA released http://hc.apache.org/

Apache Jackrabbit™ Oak –a scalable, high-performance hierarchical content repository designed for use as the foundation of modern world-class Web sites and other demanding content applications.
 - Apache Jackrabbit Oak 1.6.7 released http://jackrabbit.apache.org/

Apache MXNet (incubating) –a deep learning framework designed for both efficiency and flexibility.
 - Apache MXNet 1.0.0 released http://mxnet.incubator.apache.org/

Apache NiFi™ MiNiFi –a subproject of Apache NiFi (supports powerful and scalable directed graphs of data routing, transformation, and system mediation logic).
 - Apache NiFi MiNiFi C++ 0.3.0 released https://nifi.apache.org/minifi


Did You Know?

 - Did you know that the investigation into the Paradise Papers was made possible using Apache Tika to extract and process document metadata, and Apache Solr to index the documents? http://tika.apache.org/ and http://lucene.apache.org/solr/

 - Did you know that the Apache Mynewt embedded OS is optimized for networking and built for remote management of constrained devices? http://mynewt.apache.org/

 - Did you know that UK's Funding Circle uses Apache Kafka's Streams API to process millions of dollars' worth of financial transactions in real-time with low latency and high performance? http://kafka.apache.org/


Apache Community Notices:

 - Foundation Statement –Apache Is Open. https://s.apache.org/PIRA

 - "Success at Apache" focuses on the processes behind why the ASF "just works". 1) Project Independence https://s.apache.org/CE0V 2) All Carrot and No Stick https://s.apache.org/ykoG 3) Asynchronous Decision Making https://s.apache.org/PMvk4) Rule of the Makers https://s.apache.org/yFgQ 5) JFDI --the unconditional love of contributors https://s.apache.org/4pjM 6) Meritocracy and Me https://s.apache.org/tQQh 7) Learning to Build a Stronger Community https://s.apache.org/x9Be 8) Meritocracy. https://s.apache.org/DiEo 9) Lowering Barriers to Open Innovation https://s.apache.org/dAlg 10) All My Roads Led to Apache https://s.apache.org/l9OO 11) Scratch Your Own Itch. https://s.apache.org/7Amk

 - Follow the ASF on social media: @TheASF on Twitter and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-apache-software-foundation (re-tweets/shares/likes most appreciated!)

 - Do friend and follow us on the Apache Community Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ApacheSoftwareFoundation/and Twitter account https://twitter.com/ApacheCommunity

 - The list of Apache project-related MeetUps can be found at http://apache.org/events/meetups.html

 - Meet members of the Apache community at Open Expo Madrid 6-7 June 2018 http://www.openexpo.es/en/

 - ASF Quarterly Report: Operations Summary Q2 FY2018 https://s.apache.org/j1GJ

 - ASF Annual Report is available at https://s.apache.org/FY2017AnnualReport

 - Find out how you can participate with Apache community/projects/activities --opportunities open with Apache HTTP Server, Avro, ComDev (community development), Directory, Incubator, OODT, POI, Polygene, Syncope, Tika, Trafodion, and more! https://helpwanted.apache.org/

 - Are your software solutions Powered by Apache? Download & use our "Powered By" logos http://www.apache.org/foundation/press/kit/#poweredby

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For real-time updates, sign up for Apache-related news by sending mail to [email protected] and follow @TheASF on Twitter. For a broader spectrum from the Apache community, https://twitter.com/PlanetApache provides an aggregate of Project activities as well as the personal blogs and tweets of select ASF Committers.

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Friday December 01, 2017

The Apache News Round-up: week ending 1 December 2017

We're at the final stretch of the year --happy December! Let's review what we've been up to over the past week:

Support Apache –Adobe, Bloomberg, and Google are among the organizations who match or exceed the contributions made by their employees. If your employer has a Matching Gifts program, please consider adding The Apache Software Foundation to your list of beneficiary organizations. Every dollar counts. http://apache.org/foundation/contributing.html

ASF Board –management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws.
 - Next Board Meeting: 20 December. Board calendar and minutes http://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html
 - The Apache Software Foundation Operations Summary: August - October 2017 https://s.apache.org/j1GJ

ASF Infrastructure –our distributed team on three continents keeps the ASF's infrastructure running around the clock.
 - 7M+ weekly checks yield happy performance at 99.73% uptime http://status.apache.org/

ASF Operations Factoid –this week, 98 Apache contributors changed 113,918 lines of code over 340 commits. Top 5 contributors, in order, are: Jonathan Hurley, Mark Thomas, Jacky Li, Andrew Gaul, and Francesco Chicchiriccò.

Apache CXF™ –an Open Source services framework that helps you build and develop services using frontend programming APIs like JAX-WS and JAX-RS.
 - Apache Apache CXF 3.0.16 and CXF Fediz 1.4.3 and 1.3.3 released with a new security advisory CVE-2017-12631 http://cxf.apache.org/

Apache Directory™ Kerby –a Java Kerberos binding.
 - Apache Directory Kerby 1.1.0 released http://directory.apache.org/kerby/

Apache Groovy™ –a multi-facet programming language for the JVM.
 - Apache Groovy 3.0.0-alpha-1 released https://groovy.apache.org/

Apache HttpComponents™ Client –a library for client-side HTTP communication.
 - Apache HttpComponents Client 5.0 alpha3 released http://hc.apache.org/

Apache Impala™ –high performance analytic database for Apache Hadoop in-Cloud or on-premises.
 - The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache® Impala™ as a Top-Level Project https://s.apache.org/WpqC

Apache jclouds™ –Open Source multi-Cloud toolkit.
 - Apache jclouds 2.0.3 released http://jclouds.apache.org/

Apache Qpid™ –client supporting the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol 1.0, based around the Apache Qpid Proton protocol engine and implementing the AMQP JMS Mapping as it evolves at OASIS.
 - Apache Qpid C++ 1.37.0 released http://qpid.apache.org/
 - [CVE-2017-15701] Apache Qpid Broker-J Denial of Service Vulnerability http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-announce/201711.mbox/%3CCAFEMS4vr8tXkkmRj%2By6g0p3y3r9SqDL8Gf9%2BouhbKjPAsbJ04w%40mail.gmail.com%3E
 - [CVE-2017-15702] Apache Qpid Broker-J Authentication Vulnerability on HTTP Ports http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-announce/201711.mbox/%3CCAFEMS4s6PnZqKLHKiA9TJFb028JuObc_14%2BsU9Ev4OZojPUJ6A%40mail.gmail.com%3E

Apache Struts™ –an elegant, extensible framework for creating enterprise-ready Java Web applications.
 - Apache Struts 2.5.14 GA released http://struts.apache.org/

Apache Tomcat™ –an Open Source software implementation of the Java Servlet, JavaServer Pages, Java Unified Expression Language, Java WebSocket and Java Authentication Service Provider Interface for Containers technologies.
 - Apache Tomcat 8.5.25, 9.0.2, and Tomcat Native 1.2.16 released http://tomcat.apache.org/

Did You Know?

 - Did you know that the following Apache projects are celebrating anniversaries in December? Apache Portable Runtime (APR) (17 yrs); Logging Services (14 yrs);  Cayenne, OFBiz, and Tiles (11 yrs); Synapse (10 yrs); Camel (9 yrs); Axis, OpenWebBeans, and Pivot (8 yrs); Aries (7 yrs); ACE (6 yrs); Flex (5 yrs); Helix (4 yrs); Falcon and Flink (3 yrs); Beam and Eagle (1 yr) -- Many Happy Returns! https://projects.apache.org/committees.html?date

 - Did you know that Apache Groovy has been downloaded 40 million times since the beginning of 2017? http://groovy.apache.org/

 - Did you know that Amazon Neptune is fully compatible with Apache TinkerPop? http://tinkerpop.apache.org/


Apache Community Notices:

 - Foundation Statement –Apache Is Open. https://s.apache.org/PIRA

 - "Success at Apache" focuses on the processes behind why the ASF "just works". 1) Project Independence https://s.apache.org/CE0V 2) All Carrot and No Stick https://s.apache.org/ykoG 3) Asynchronous Decision Making https://s.apache.org/PMvk4) Rule of the Makers https://s.apache.org/yFgQ 5) JFDI --the unconditional love of contributors https://s.apache.org/4pjM 6) Meritocracy and Me https://s.apache.org/tQQh 7) Learning to Build a Stronger Community https://s.apache.org/x9Be 8) Meritocracy. https://s.apache.org/DiEo 9) Lowering Barriers to Open Innovation https://s.apache.org/dAlg 10) All My Roads Led to Apache https://s.apache.org/l9OO 11) Scratch Your Own Itch. https://s.apache.org/7Amk

 - Follow the ASF on social media: @TheASF on Twitter and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-apache-software-foundation (re-tweets/shares/likes most appreciated!)

 - Presentations from ApacheCon https://s.apache.org/Hli7 and Apache: Big Data https://s.apache.org/tefE are available; as well as videos https://s.apache.org/AE3m and audio recordings https://feathercast.apache.org/

 - Do friend and follow us on the Apache Community Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ApacheSoftwareFoundation/and Twitter account https://twitter.com/ApacheCommunity

 - The list of Apache project-related MeetUps can be found at http://apache.org/events/meetups.html

 - Members of the Apache community will be out in force at Open Source Summit Paris 6-7 December 2017 http://www.opensourcesummit.paris/

 - ASF Quarterly Report: Operations Summary Q2 FY2018 https://s.apache.org/j1GJ

 - ASF Annual Report is available at https://s.apache.org/FY2017AnnualReport

 - Find out how you can participate with Apache community/projects/activities --opportunities open with Apache HTTP Server, Avro, ComDev (community development), Directory, Incubator, OODT, POI, Polygene, Syncope, Tika, Trafodion, and more! https://helpwanted.apache.org/

 - Are your software solutions Powered by Apache? Download & use our "Powered By" logos http://www.apache.org/foundation/press/kit/#poweredby

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For real-time updates, sign up for Apache-related news by sending mail to [email protected] and follow @TheASF on Twitter. For a broader spectrum from the Apache community, https://twitter.com/PlanetApache provides an aggregate of Project activities as well as the personal blogs and tweets of select ASF Committers.

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The Apache Software Foundation Operations Summary: August - October 2017

FOUNDATION OPERATIONS SUMMARY

Second Quarter, Fiscal Year 2018 (August - October 2017)

"As a large Cloud Infrastructure company, LeaseWeb relies on a number of Open Source technologies to deliver our services. The activities of The Apache Software Foundation –and in our case, the Apache CloudStack project in particular– allow us to keep bringing innovative, quality services to the market. We are very proud to be a sponsor!"
--Robert van der Meulen, Technical Evangelist, LeaseWeb (ASF Platinum Sponsor)


> President's Statement:
 Our steady growth continues, with 6 new Top-Level Projects this quarter. Fiscally, we remain on track for FY18, with expenses under control and income coming in on budget. Notable in this quarter was the Foundation's coordinated response to the Equifax data breach, which was ultimately determined to be caused by Equifax's failure to install patches provided for Apache® Struts™ exploit. This effort involved the Marketing and Publicity, Struts PMC, and ASF Security teams; as well as and a board member (Chris Mattmann) who participated in same-day broadcast media interviews.

Other highlights:

  • Conferences is increasingly looking to participate/co-locate with existing and lower cost events;
  • Trademarks continues to show a steady increase is questions, answers, and merchandise;
  • Infrastructure continued to expand the "self service" toolset, allowing authorized committers to perform operations that previously required infrastructure staff; and 
  • Marketing and Publicity led the response to the Equifax data breach.

> Conferences and Events: In May of this year, as mentioned in our last report, we ran ApacheCon North America in Miami. This was the final event produced under our agreement with The Linux Foundation. At a meeting in Miami, and in the time since then, we have been considering how we will run the event going forward, and have investigated a number of possible avenues. In this report, I discuss two of the ways that the Apache Software Foundation will be doing events in the coming year.

  • Participating in existing events: As you know, there are many hundreds of events every year, and some of these events have substantial overlap with various Apache projects, or groups of Apache projects. It makes a lot of sense to participate in those events directly. To this end, we have reached out to a number of organizations that produce events, and requested an Apache track. We’ll set a theme for that track, based on the emphasis of the particular event, and curate the content that will be presented there. We'll try, in each case, to also provide an "Apache Way" talk, so that these audiences can learn more about how Apache operates. The first three events that fall into this category are LinuxCon China, Open Source Summit North America, and Open Source Summit Europe, produced by the Linux Foundation. These events may be found at https://www.lfasiallc.com/linuxcon-containercon-cloudopen-china , http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/open-source-summit-north-america and http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/open-source-summit-europe respectively, and the CFP for each event is now open, with an Apache category in each. The emphasis for these events is "Apache: Tomorrow's Technology Today", and focuses on incubating, or recently graduated, projects at Apache. We are also attempting to participate more fully in events that focus on a particular one of our projects, such as MesosCon, Spark Summit, and so on.
  • Colocating with existing events: We are currently in talks with Berlin Buzzwords and FOSS Backstage - https://berlinbuzzwords.de/ - about running ApacheCon Europe colocated with their 2018 event, the week of June 10th, in Berlin. The overlap in our communities and our subject areas makes this a great fit, and we hope it will result in a cost savings for both events, and cross-pollination between the project communities. Look for announcements as soon as we have something firmly planned.
  • Producing lower cost events: We are also working with the people that produce Flock - the Fedora user conference https://flocktofedora.org/ - about doing an event in that style for ApacheCon North America. We are currently hunting for a date, and should have an announcement soon. The Apache community has long asked for an event which is lower cost, possibly located at a University campus, without the frills of a major convention. This makes the event more accessible to student attendees, but also poses scheduling challenges.
  • Sponsoring and Participating in Apache Events: If you are interested in sponsoring an upcoming Apache event, follow @ApacheCon on Twitter for announcements, calls for papers, and calls for sponsorship, over the coming months. We will be looking for sponsors and partners in each of the above categories.

If you have any questions or comments about our event strategy, please contact Rich Bowen, VP Conferences, at [email protected] 


> Community Development
: During this quarter our main focus was to promote an Apache presence at existing conferences with a booth or presentation content. In early September we were invited to present a 3 day track and a keynote at the Solutions Hamburg conference. This is an established conference that has approximately 5000 attendees. It was a good opportunity to reach a new audience and inform them about Apache and its projects. Our 3 day Apache track was presented in a combination of English and German and consisted of a Developer-Centric day, a DevOps-Centric day and a Foundation-Centric day. The most popular talks were related to Micro-Services and Open Source Licensing.

The Open Source Summit in Prague during October featured several Apache related presentations including a keynote and a mix of other technical and community related content. We also had the opportunity to present the results of our Apache Committers Diversity Survey as part of the Diversity Empowerment Summit. During the conference we were also able to record some attendee interviews for our podcast channel FeatherCast. Community Development ran the Apache booth at MesosCon EU which was co-located as part of the Open Source Summit. Feedback from attendees was very positive and showed a keen interest in learning more about other Apache projects as well as the Foundation itself.

Another task this quarter has been the preparation of marketing materials that can be used at events to help promote the role and mission of the ASF. An information brochure has been developed and translated into several languages. The brochure is currently available in English, Catalan, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian and Japanese. Also marketing related was the discussion about the introduction of Apache Community Business Cards. The idea is to have an Apache style business card that could be given out to people. This would be very useful for people who are at an event representing their Apache role or project or for volunteers at the ASF booth that want to give their out their contact information to someone they have been speaking to. Feedback to this has been extremely positive and we have will be promoting the use of community business cards to committers and projects.

Our mailing list traffic has increased this quarter as a result of several interesting discussions and the re-vitalisation of our task and issue tracker.


> Committers and Contributions:
 Over the past quarter, 1,647 contributors committed 47,831 changes that amount to 16,483,455 lines of code across Apache projects. The top 5 contributors during this timeframe are: Daniel Gruno (661 commits), Oliver Lietz (572 commits), Jian He (558 commits), Claus Ibsen (540 commits), and Varun Saxena (491 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 Q2 FY2018, the ASF Secretary processed 203 ICLAs, 13 CCLAs, and 4 Software Grants. Apache committer activity can be seen at http://status.apache.org/#commits

> Marketing and Publicity: Over the ASF's 18 year history, marketing and publicity activities have focused on raising awareness of the Foundation's collective successes that include highlighting milestones with Apache projects, communities, and events.

This quarter presented unprecedented levels of crisis communications activity in response to the Equifax data breach. Our all-volunteer technical and executive teams must be lauded for their extraordinary efforts in helping us respond to the media surge by identifying spokespeople in a very short timeframe, and preparing official statements across time zones and geographic locations, with special thanks to those who worked throughout their holiday vacations. We would like to recognize those who helped escalate and troubleshoot the issue internally, notably René Gielen, Łucasz Lenart, Mark Cox, and Mark Thomas, who contributed to countless editorial and interview preparation cycles, and Chris Mattmann, who participated in broadcast media interviews with primary television networks. We also worked with ASF legal counsel to draft our official response to the US House Committee's panel hearing. 

We issued 9 press releases during this timeframe, as well as one Foundation statement. They include:

  • MEDIA ALERT: The Apache Software Foundation Confirms Equifax Data Breach Due to Failure to Install Patches Provided for Apache® Struts™ Exploit https://s.apache.org/7bip
  • Response From The Apache® Software Foundation To Questions From US House Committee On Energy And Commerce Regarding Equifax Data Breach https://s.apache.org/rjmv
  • Foundation Statement: Apache Is Open. https://s.apache.org/PIRA

In total this quarter, we handled 92 media queries and appeared in 32,777 news articles. 


> Brand Management: 
The fall quarter in the Northern Hemisphere brings a regular uptick in requests and questions, which continues to require effort to provide timely and complete answers to questioners, especially outside parties. We've also seen a large uptick in requests to create non-computer merchandise (shirts, giveaways, etc.) using Apache brands. Most of these requests are a good way to help promote awareness of Apache projects and their contributors, and are well in line with our policy: https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/merchandise

While a few Apache project PMCs continue to actively monitor uses of their brand and raise issues appropriately, the rapid growth in popular projects, both in the Big Data space and elsewhere, continues to be an issue with our capacity to provide knowledgeable and timely responses to questions.  We will be investigating new ways to invest in our ability to provide the branding and trademark services that our many Apache projects deserve.

All of the ASF's education and policies around trademark law for Open Source as well as brand management are published online, and we urge project participants and software vendors alike to review and ask us questions about them - please review our complete site map: http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/resources

On the registration front, we continue to work with counsel to process renewals and registrations for projects.  While most are straightforward, some are complex, and require a significant amount of both our limited volunteer officer time as well as our counsel's time.

As Apache projects power more of the Internet every day, we look to the companies that profit from Apache software products to fully respect Apache brands. We very much appreciate the companies that pass on their **completed** trademark registrations along with the codebases they donate to the Apache Incubator. Having existing registrations makes managing trademarks much simpler for the ASF.

While many companies continue to give credit to our volunteer communities, sadly some companies continue to take advantage of our non-profit work by unfairly co-opting Apache project brands or by interfering with Apache project governance.

Reviewing and correcting these mis-uses is an ongoing effort for the ASF Board, the Brand Management Committee, and all Apache projects.

Please contact the Apache Brand Management team http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/contact with your questions or suggestions!


> Legal Affairs:
 The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) Legal Affairs team works diligently with our pro-bono legal counsel and answers legal questions, and addresses policy issues regarding license compatibility for The Apache Software Foundation.

In the last quarter, the Legal Affairs team worked with several ASF communities concerned about the use of Facebook's React.js web framework and its inclusion in Apache projects. After a detailed analysis and decision, the committee forbade the use of React within Apache projects under the Facebook BSD+Patents license. This also applied to other software licensed under BSD+Patents. After the September Apache Board meeting, Facebook decided to relicense the React.js software from BSD+Patents to the MIT license. This re-enabled the use of React.js within Apache projects.

The traditional legal questions surrounding license guidance on software included in Apache products continue to come in and to be answered in a timely fashion. In the last quarter, the committee has also helped requestors:

  • Clarify how software grants should be accepted from external companies donating software to the ASF.
  • Identify whether importing code version control system (VCS) history from external entities that may include category-X software should be handled.
  • Understand the implications of downstream service providers that redistribute Apache Software under different licenses. 
  • Decide on the inclusion of public test files in repositories and whether it should be considered "fair use".
  • Use externally licensed design software to construct an Apache project's website.

The committee is a Board committee and reports directly Apache Board of Directors. We are eager to meet and serve the needs of our projects, in collaboration with our pro-bono counsel.

> Infrastructure: Infrastructure has been busy with its continued program of decommissioning our hardware, and moving services onto Cloud-provided hardware and VMs. Over time, this has provided marked increases in our reliability and service to the Foundation's projects.

During this past quarter, we upgraded the Jenkins build master and added many more build nodes. The service is used by very many projects, with a great variety of needs. It is a challenge to keep pace, but the team has done well in this regard.

As in previous quarters, we have been moving more projects over to the GitHub-based set of tools. This program has been successful, and the Foundation's communities have been taking advantage of the offer. 

Much of our work over the quarter has been behind-the-scenes -- managing our remaining hardware, dealing with service issues, updating our mail archive systems, and other tasks. However, in August, we did roll out a new user-facing tool for projects to directly perform many service requests which used to require a Jira ticket.


> Financial Statement:


> Fundraising:
 The ASF Fundraising team would like to welcome Assembla, Blog Starter, Mobile Slots and Wise Buyer to the Apache Family.

Over this past quarter we have been creating our Directed Sponsorship program working with sponsors to meet and recognize the specific needs of the foundation and our projects.  We'll officially launch this in Q4 2017. 

We'll also be increasing our sponsorship rates starting in January for the first time in our 18 year history!

As ever, thank you to our Sponsors http://apache.org/foundation/thanks . Your donations are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.

# # #

Report prepared by Sally Khudairi, Vice President Marketing & Publicity, with contributions by Sam Ruby, ASF President; Rich Bowen, Vice President Conferences; Sharan Foga, Vice President Community Development; Chris Mattmann, Vice President Legal Affairs; Shane Curcuru, Vice President Brand Management; Greg Stein, ASF Infrastructure Administrator; Tom Pappas, ASF Member and Vice President, Finance & Accounting at Virtual, Inc.; and Kevin McGrail, Vice President Fundraising.

For more information, subscribe to the [email protected] 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 2017. 


Tuesday November 28, 2017

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache® Impala™ as a Top-Level Project

High performance analytic database for Apache Hadoop in-Cloud or on-premises in use at Caterpillar, Cox Automotive, Jobrapido, Marketing Associates, the New York Stock Exchange, phData, and Quest Diagnostics, among others.

Forest Hill, MD —28 November 2017— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache® Impala™ has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.
Apache Impala is a modern, high-performance analytic database for Apache Hadoop. The massively parallel processing (MPP) SQL query engine allows for analytical queries on data stored on-premises (in HDFS or Apache Kudu) or in Cloud object storage via SQL or business intelligence tools without having to migrate data sets into specialized systems or proprietary formats.

"The Impala project has grown a lot since we entered incubation in December 2015," said Jim Apple, Vice President of Apache Impala. "With the help of our mentors and the Incubator, we have grown as a community and adopted the Apache Way, all while the Impala contributors have helped make Impala more stable and performant."

In addition to using the same unified storage platform as other Hadoop components, Impala also uses the same metadata, SQL syntax (Apache Hive SQL), ODBC driver, and user interface (Impala query UI in Hue) as Hive. This provides a familiar and unified platform for real-time or batch-oriented queries. Impala provides:
  • A familiar SQL interface that data scientists and analysts already know;
  • The ability to query high volumes of data (Big Data) in Apache Hadoop;
  • Distributed queries in a cluster environment, for convenient scaling and to make use of cost-effective commodity hardware;
  • The ability to share data files between different components with no copy or export/import step; for example, to write with Apache Pig, transform with Hive and query with Impala. Impala can read from and write to Hive tables, enabling simple data interchange using Impala for analytics on Hive-produced data; and
  • A single system for big data processing and analytics, so customers can avoid costly modeling and ETL just for analytics.

Impala was inspired by Google's F1 database, which also separates query processing from storage management. It was originally released in 2012 and entered the Apache Incubator in December 2015. The project has had four releases during its incubation process.

"In 2011, we started development of Impala in order to make state-of-the-art SQL analytics available to the user community as open-source technology," said Marcel Kornacker, original founder of the Impala project. "The graduation to an Apache Top-Level Project is a recognition of the exceptional developer community that stands behind this project."

Apache Impala is deployed across a number of industries such as financial services, healthcare, and telecommunications, and is in use at companies that include Caterpillar, Cox Automotive, Jobrapido, Marketing Associates, the New York Stock Exchange, phData, and Quest Diagnostics. In addition, Impala is shipped by Cloudera, MapR, and Oracle.

"Apache Impala is our interactive SQL tool of choice. Over 30 phData customers have it deployed to production," said Brock Noland, Chief Architect at phData. "Combined with Apache Kudu for real-time storage, Impala has made architecting IoT and Data Warehousing use-cases dead simple. We can deploy more production use-cases with fewer people, delivering increased value to our customers. We're excited to see Impala graduate to a top-level project and look forward to contributing to its success."

"We use Apache Impala to boost performance of our SQL queries against our data lake," said Matteo Coloberti, Head of Analytics at Jobrapido. "Impala is an incredible service that gives us impressive performance on queries."

"We used to distribute Microsoft Excel reports to clients every one or two days but now they can search on their own by customer, sales deal, or even service type," said Andy Frey, CTO of Marketing Associates. "Apache Impala is used to query millions of rows to identify specific records that match the clients' criteria. We've even given clients a 'Query Hadoop' option that allows them to create simple SQL statements and query Hadoop directly via Impala. We're able to offer a faster, richer, and more accurate selection of services without the labor or latency concerns that we used to have."

"The Apache Impala community is growing, and we welcome new contributors to join in our efforts in our code, documentation, issue tracker, and discussion forums," added Apple.

Catch Apache Impala in action at Not Another Big Data Conference, taking place 12 December 2017 in Palo Alto, CA.

Availability and Oversight
Apache Impala software is released under the Apache License v2.0 and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. For downloads, documentation, and ways to become involved with Apache Impala, visit http://impala.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/ApacheImpala

About the Apache Incubator
The Apache Incubator is the entry path for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the efforts at The Apache Software Foundation. All code donations from external organizations and existing external projects wishing to join the ASF enter through the Incubator to: 1) ensure all donations are in accordance with the ASF legal standards; and 2) develop new communities that adhere to our guiding principles. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF. For more information, visit http://incubator.apache.org/

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 680 individual Members and 6,300 Committers across six continents successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Alibaba Cloud Computing, ARM, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cash Store, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hewlett Packard, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, Inspur, iSIGMA, ODPi, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, PhoenixNAP, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Serenata Flowers, Target, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Impala", "Apache Impala", "Hadoop", "Apache Hadoop", "Hive", "Apache Hive", "Kudu", "Apache Kudu", "Pig", "Apache Pig", 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.

# # #

Friday November 24, 2017

The Apache News Round-up: week ending 24 November 2017

Happy post-US-Thanksgiving Friday! We appreciate your continued enthusiastic interest and readership; here's what we've been up to:

Support Apache –we depend on the generous support from people like you. Please, consider making a donation to help sustain the ASF's work. There are many ways to make a donation, from debit/credit cards to ACH bank payments to PayPal to Bitcoin to shopping at Amazon and more. Every dollar helps. http://apache.org/foundation/contributing.html

ASF Board –management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws.
 - Next Board Meeting: 20 December. Board calendar and minutes http://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html

ASF Infrastructure –our distributed team on three continents keeps the ASF's infrastructure running around the clock.
 - 7M+ weekly checks yield snappy performance at 99.52% uptime http://status.apache.org/

ASF Operations Factoid –this week, 192 Apache contributors changed 325,974 lines of code over 986 commits. Top 5 contributors, in order, are: Stephen Mallette, Jorge Bay Gondra, Karl Wright, Mark Thomas, and Randall Leeds.

Apache Apex™ Malhar –an enterprise grade Big Data-in-motion platform that unifies stream and batch processing.
 - Apache Apex Malhar 3.8.0 released http://apex.apache.org/

Apache BookKeeper™ –a scalable, fault-tolerant, and low-latency storage service optimized for real-time workloads.
 - Apache BookKeeper 4.5.1 released https://bookkeeper.apache.org/

Apache Commons™ Daemon –software library that provides a generic Daemon (Unix) or Service (Windows) wrapper for Java code.
 - Apache Commons Daemon 1.1.0 released http://commons.us.apache.org/proper/commons-daemon/

Apache Groovy™ –a multi-facet programming language for the JVM.
 - Apache Groovy 2.4.13 released https://groovy.apache.org/

Apache Jackrabbit™ –a scalable, high-performance hierarchical content repository designed for use as the foundation of modern world-class Web sites and other demanding content applications.
 - Apache Jackrabbit 2.16.0 released http://jackrabbit.apache.org/

Apache Kafka™ –distributed, fault tolerant, publish-subscribe messaging.
 - Apache Kafka 0.11.0.2 released http://kafka.apache.org/

Apache Log4j™ –a well known framework for logging application behavior.
 - Apache Log4j 2.10.0 released https://logging.apache.org/log4j/2.x/

Apache Lucy™ Clownfish –"symbiotic" object system pairs with "host" dynamic language environments and facilitates the development of high performance host language extensions.
 - Apache Clownfish 0.6.2 released http://lucy.apache.org/

Apache SIS™ –a Java language library for developing geospatial applications (Spatial Information System).
 - Apache Apache SIS 0.8 released http://sis.apache.org/

Did You Know?

 - Did you know that Amazon Rekognition uses Apache MXNet (incubating) for Deep Learning to solve complex problems such as image recognition and natural language speech? http://mxnet.apache.org/

 - Did you know that Dell, MailChimp, Nordstrom, Oracle, and Toyota use Apache Lucene Solr and Apache Spark for their Big Data search solutions? http://lucene.apache.org/ and http://spark.apache.org/

 - Did you know that you can participate in the Apache Mesos annual survey for a change to win a DJI Spark Drone or an Apple Watch 3? https://twitter.com/ApacheMesos/status/931560074488754176


Apache Community Notices:

 - Foundation Statement –Apache Is Open. https://s.apache.org/PIRA

 - "Success at Apache" focuses on the processes behind why the ASF "just works". 1) Project Independence https://s.apache.org/CE0V 2) All Carrot and No Stick https://s.apache.org/ykoG 3) Asynchronous Decision Making https://s.apache.org/PMvk4) Rule of the Makers https://s.apache.org/yFgQ 5) JFDI --the unconditional love of contributors https://s.apache.org/4pjM 6) Meritocracy and Me https://s.apache.org/tQQh 7) Learning to Build a Stronger Community https://s.apache.org/x9Be 8) Meritocracy. https://s.apache.org/DiEo 9) Lowering Barriers to Open Innovation https://s.apache.org/dAlg 10) All My Roads Led to Apache https://s.apache.org/l9OO 11) Scratch Your Own Itch. https://s.apache.org/7Amk

 - Follow the ASF on social media: @TheASF on Twitter and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-apache-software-foundation (re-tweets/shares/likes most appreciated!)

 - Presentations from ApacheCon https://s.apache.org/Hli7 and Apache: Big Data https://s.apache.org/tefE are available; as well as videos https://s.apache.org/AE3m and audio recordings https://feathercast.apache.org/

 - Do friend and follow us on the Apache Community Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ApacheSoftwareFoundation/and Twitter account https://twitter.com/ApacheCommunity

 - The list of Apache project-related MeetUps can be found at http://apache.org/events/meetups.html

 - Members of the Apache community will be out in force at Open Source Summit Paris 6-7 December 2017 http://www.opensourcesummit.paris/

 - ASF Quarterly Report: Operations Summary Q1 FY2018 https://s.apache.org/cEUm

 - ASF Annual Report is available at https://s.apache.org/FY2017AnnualReport

 - Find out how you can participate with Apache community/projects/activities --opportunities open with Apache HTTP Server, Avro, ComDev (community development), Directory, Incubator, OODT, POI, Polygene, Syncope, Tika, Trafodion, and more! https://helpwanted.apache.org/

 - Are your software solutions Powered by Apache? Download & use our "Powered By" logos http://www.apache.org/foundation/press/kit/#poweredby

= = =

For real-time updates, sign up for Apache-related news by sending mail to [email protected] and follow @TheASF on Twitter. For a broader spectrum from the Apache community, https://twitter.com/PlanetApache provides an aggregate of Project activities as well as the personal blogs and tweets of select ASF Committers.

# # #

Friday November 17, 2017

The Apache News Round-up: week ending 17 November 2017

Happy Friday, everyone! Let's review what the Apache community at-large has been up to over the past week:

ASF Board –management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws.
 - Next Board Meeting: 20 December. Board calendar and minutes http://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html

ASF Infrastructure –our distributed team on three continents keeps the ASF's infrastructure running around the clock.
 - 7M+ weekly checks yield brilliant performance at 99.69% uptime http://status.apache.org/

ASF Operations Factoid –this week, 180 Apache contributors changed 314,925 lines of code over 965 commits. Top 5 contributors, in order, are: Stephen Mallette, Gary Gregory, Dusan Balek,Tilman Hausherr, and Ravindra Pesala.

Apache Bigtop™ –Big Data management platform.
 - Apache Bigtop 1.2.1 released http://bigtop.apache.org/

Apache CXF™ –an Open Source services framework that helps you build and develop services using frontend programming APIs like JAX-WS and JAX-RS.
 - New security advisory CVE-2017-12624 released for Apache CXF http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-announce/201711.mbox/%3CCAB8XdGBgipTU4-ajO0j8Khi67kziTcTqwCQbCcpRicGLd81dNA%40mail.gmail.com%3E

Apache Groovy™ –a multi-facet programming language for the JVM.
 - Apache Groovy 2.6.0-alpha-2 released https://groovy.apache.org/

Apache Jackrabbit™ –a scalable, high-performance hierarchical content repository designed for use as the foundation of modern world-class Web sites and other demanding content applications.
 - Apache Jackrabbit 2.15.8 and Jackrabbit Oak 1.7.11 released http://jackrabbit.apache.org/

Apache Mnemonic (incubating) –an Open Source Java-based storage-class memory oriented durable object platform for linked objects processing and analytics.
 - Apache Mnemonic-0.10.0-incubating released

Apache Phoenix™ –enables OLTP and SQL-based operational analytics for Apache Hadoop.
 - Apache Phoenix 4.13 released https://phoenix.apache.org/

Apache UIMA™ –a component architecture and framework for the analysis of unstructured content like text, video and audio data.
 - Apache UIMA Java SDK 3.0.0-beta and uimaFIT 2.4.0 released http://uima.apache.org

Apache ZooKeeper™ –a high-performance coordination service for distributed applications.
 - Apache ZooKeeper 3.4.11 released http://zookeeper.apache.org/

Did You Know?

 - Did you know that you can help test the Apache Struts 2.5.14 test build? https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/958bed42bb445caf1f4e80f1137ff315b70ea3299c5a765cccb9280a@%3Cdev.struts.apache.org%3E

 - Did you know that LinkedIn is leveraging Apache Calcite to provide richer operators in Dali (Data Access at LinkedIn) Views? http://calcite.apache.org/

 - Did you know that Archemy's ArchNav (extensible ontology-driven search engine and knowledge repository) uses Apache Fortress for security? http://directory.apache.org/fortress/


Apache Community Notices:

 - Foundation Statement –Apache Is Open. https://s.apache.org/PIRA

 - "Success at Apache" focuses on the processes behind why the ASF "just works". 1) Project Independence https://s.apache.org/CE0V 2) All Carrot and No Stick https://s.apache.org/ykoG 3) Asynchronous Decision Making https://s.apache.org/PMvk 4) Rule of the Makers https://s.apache.org/yFgQ 5) JFDI --the unconditional love of contributors https://s.apache.org/4pjM 6) Meritocracy and Me https://s.apache.org/tQQh 7) Learning to Build a Stronger Community https://s.apache.org/x9Be 8) Meritocracy. https://s.apache.org/DiEo 9) Lowering Barriers to Open Innovation https://s.apache.org/dAlg 10) All My Roads Led to Apache https://s.apache.org/l9OO 11) Scratch Your Own Itch. https://s.apache.org/7Amk

 - Follow the ASF on social media: @TheASF on Twitter and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-apache-software-foundation (re-tweets/shares/likes most appreciated!)

 - Presentations from ApacheCon https://s.apache.org/Hli7 and Apache: Big Data https://s.apache.org/tefE are available; as well as videos https://s.apache.org/AE3m and audio recordings https://feathercast.apache.org/

 - Do friend and follow us on the Apache Community Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ApacheSoftwareFoundation/and Twitter account https://twitter.com/ApacheCommunity

 - The list of Apache project-related MeetUps can be found at http://apache.org/events/meetups.html

 - The ASF will be participating at China Open Source Conference COSCon '17 18-19 November in Shanghai http://www.huodongxing.com/go/coscon17

 - Apache community members share leadership best practices on Open Source governance, community leadership, open development, and more at FOSS Backstage in Berlin on 20 November 2017 https://berlinbuzzwords.de/17/news/foss-backstage-micro-summit-registration-open-now

 - Meet members of the Apache CloudStack community at the CloudStack European User Group on 21 November in Leipzig https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cloudstack-european-user-group-tickets-38657799519?aff=estw

 - New to the Apache Subversion annual hackathon: a meet-and-greet event with the project Committers! Join us on 23 November in Aachen https://wiki.apache.org/subversion/Aachen2017MeetAndGreet

 - Members of the Apache community will be out in force at Open Source Summit Paris 6-7 December 2017 http://www.opensourcesummit.paris/

 - ASF Quarterly Report: Operations Summary Q1 FY2018 https://s.apache.org/cEUm

 - ASF Annual Report is available at https://s.apache.org/FY2017AnnualReport

 - Find out how you can participate with Apache community/projects/activities --opportunities open with Apache HTTP Server, Avro, ComDev (community development), Directory, Incubator, OODT, POI, Polygene, Syncope, Tika, Trafodion, and more! https://helpwanted.apache.org/

 - Are your software solutions Powered by Apache? Download & use our "Powered By" logos http://www.apache.org/foundation/press/kit/#poweredby

= = =

For real-time updates, sign up for Apache-related news by sending mail to [email protected] and follow @TheASF on Twitter. For a broader spectrum from the Apache community, https://twitter.com/PlanetApache provides an aggregate of Project activities as well as the personal blogs and tweets of select ASF Committers.

# # #

Friday November 10, 2017

The Apache News Round-up: week ending 10 November 2017

And it's Friday already ... time flies when you're as productive as the Apache community! Here's what happened this week:

ASF Board –management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws.
 - Next Board Meeting: 15 November. Board calendar and minutes http://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html

ASF Infrastructure –our distributed team on three continents keeps the ASF's infrastructure running around the clock.
 - 7M+ weekly checks yield astute performance at 99.19% uptime http://status.apache.org/

ASF Operations Factoid –this week, 422 Apache contributors changed 857,635 lines of code over 2,005 commits. Top 5 contributors, in order, are: Jian He, Mark Thomas, Tilman Hausherr, Svatopluk Dedic, and Carlos Sierra Andrés.

Apache Commons™ Lang –provides helper utilities for the java.lang API, notably String manipulation methods, basic numerical methods, object reflection, concurrency, creation and serialization and System properties.
 - Apache Commons Lang 3.7 released http://commons.apache.org/lang/

Apache CouchDB™ –pioneering Open Source database that scales from Big Data to Mobile.
 - Apache CouchDB 2.1.1 and 1.7.0 released http://couchdb.apache.org/

Apache Freemarker (incubating) –a Java library template engine to generate text output (HTML web pages, e-mails, configuration files, source code, etc.) based on templates and changing data.
 - Apache FreeMarker 2.3.27-incubating released http://freemarker.org/

Apache HttpComponents™ Core –a set of HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 transport components that can be used to build custom client and server side HTTP services with a minimal footprint.
 - HttpComponents Core 5.0 beta1 released http://hc.apache.org/

Apache Jena™ –a framework for developing Semantic Web and Linked Data applications in Java.
 - Apache Jena 3.5.0 released http://jena.apache.org/

Apache Kylin™ –an Open Source Distributed Analytics Engine designed to provide SQL interface and multi-dimensional analysis (OLAP) on Apache Hadoop, supporting extremely large datasets.
 - Apache Kylin 2.2.0 released https://kylin.apache.org/

Apache OpenMeetings™ –provides video conferencing, instant messaging, white board, collaborative document editing and other groupware tools using API functions of the Red5 Streaming Server for Remoting and Streaming.
 - Apache OpenMeetings 4.0.0 released http://openmeetings.apache.org

Apache Qpid™ –a messaging library for the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol 1.0 (AMQP 1.0, ISO/IEC 19464, http://www.amqp.org).
 - Apache Qpid Proton 0.18.1 and Qpid JMS 0.27.0 released http://qpid.apache.org/

Apache UIMA™ –a component architecture and framework for the analysis of unstructured content like text, video and audio data.
 - Apache UIMA Java SDK 2.10.2 released http://uima.apache.org

Did You Know?

 - Did you know that Apache Community Development (ComDev) issue a monthly blog? Catch up at https://s.apache.org/rE1T

 - Did you know that the Italian Army uses Apache Syncope for identity management? http://syncope.apache.org/

 - Did you know that the following Apache projects are celebrating anniversaries in November? Many happy returns to Apache Ant (15 yrs); Apache Labs (11 yrs); Apache HttpComponents (10 yrs); Apache Attic, Buildr, CouchDB, and Qpid (9 yrs); Apache Community Development (8 yrs); Apache OODT and ZooKeeper (7 yrs); Apache Kafka and Syncope (5 yrs); Apache Ambari and Marmotta (4 yrs); Apache BookKeeper, Drill, and MetaModel (3 yrs); Apache Brooklyn, Groovy, Kylin, and REEF (2 yrs); and Apache Geode (1 yr)!


Apache Community Notices:

 - Foundation Statement –Apache Is Open. https://s.apache.org/PIRA

 - "Success at Apache" focuses on the processes behind why the ASF "just works". 1) Project Independence https://s.apache.org/CE0V 2) All Carrot and No Stick https://s.apache.org/ykoG 3) Asynchronous Decision Making https://s.apache.org/PMvk4) Rule of the Makers https://s.apache.org/yFgQ 5) JFDI --the unconditional love of contributors https://s.apache.org/4pjM 6) Meritocracy and Me https://s.apache.org/tQQh 7) Learning to Build a Stronger Community https://s.apache.org/x9Be 8) Meritocracy. https://s.apache.org/DiEo 9) Lowering Barriers to Open Innovation https://s.apache.org/dAlg 10) All My Roads Led to Apache https://s.apache.org/l9OO 11) Scratch Your Own Itch. https://s.apache.org/7Amk

 - Follow the ASF on social media: @TheASF on Twitter and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-apache-software-foundation (re-tweets/shares/likes most appreciated!)

 - Presentations from ApacheCon https://s.apache.org/Hli7 and Apache: Big Data https://s.apache.org/tefE are available; as well as videos https://s.apache.org/AE3m and audio recordings https://feathercast.apache.org/

 - Do friend and follow us on the Apache Community Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ApacheSoftwareFoundation/and Twitter account https://twitter.com/ApacheCommunity

 - The list of Apache project-related MeetUps can be found at http://apache.org/events/meetups.html

 - The ASF will be participating at China Open Source Conference COSCon '17 18-19 November in Shanghai http://www.huodongxing.com/go/coscon17

 - Apache community members share leadership best practices on Open Source governance, community leadership, open development, and more at FOSS Backstage in Berlin on 20 November 2017 https://berlinbuzzwords.de/17/news/foss-backstage-micro-summit-registration-open-now

 - Meet members of the Apache CloudStack community at the CloudStack European User Group on 21 November in Leipzig https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cloudstack-european-user-group-tickets-38657799519?aff=estw

 - Members of the Apache community will be out in force at Open Source Summit Paris 6-7 December 2017 http://www.opensourcesummit.paris/

 - ASF Quarterly Report: Operations Summary Q1 FY2018 https://s.apache.org/cEUm

 - ASF Annual Report is available at https://s.apache.org/FY2017AnnualReport

 - Find out how you can participate with Apache community/projects/activities --opportunities open with Apache HTTP Server, Avro, ComDev (community development), Directory, Incubator, OODT, POI, Polygene, Syncope, Tika, Trafodion, and more! https://helpwanted.apache.org/

 - Are your software solutions Powered by Apache? Download & use our "Powered By" logos http://www.apache.org/foundation/press/kit/#poweredby

= = =

For real-time updates, sign up for Apache-related news by sending mail to [email protected] and follow @TheASF on Twitter. For a broader spectrum from the Apache community, https://twitter.com/PlanetApache provides an aggregate of Project activities as well as the personal blogs and tweets of select ASF Committers.

# # #

Friday November 03, 2017

The Apache News Round-up: week ending 3 November 2017

Enter November! The Apache community has been working on the following over the past week:

ASF Board –management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws.
 - Next Board Meeting: 15 November. Board calendar and minutes http://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html

ASF Infrastructure –our distributed team on three continents keeps the ASF's infrastructure running around the clock.
 - 7M+ weekly checks yield pert performance at 99.02% uptime http://status.apache.org/

ASF Operations Factoid –this week, 460 Apache contributors changed 915,743 lines of code over 2,359 commits. Top 5 contributors, in order, are: Stephen Mallette, Daniel Templeton, Gary Gregory, Tilman Hausherr, and Paul King.

Apache Any23™ –Anything To Triples is a library, a Web service, and a command line tool that extracts structured data in RDF format from a variety of Web documents.
 - Apache Any23 2.1 https://any23.apache.org

Apache Geode™ –low latency, high concurrency data management solutions.
 - Apache Geode 1.3.0 released http://geode.apache.org/

Apache Hive™ –Big Data warehouse that facilitates querying and managing large datasets residing in distributed storage.
 - CVE-2017-12625 Apache Hive information disclosure vulnerability for column masking http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-announce/201710.mbox/%3C3791103E-80D5-4E75-AF23-6F8ED54DDEBE%40apache.org%3E

Apache Ignite™ –in-memory computing platform that is durable, strongly consistent, and highly available with powerful SQL, key-value and processing APIs.
 - Apache Ignite 2.3.0 released https://ignite.apache.org/

Apache Jackrabbit™ –a fully conforming implementation of the Content Repository for Java Technology API (JCR).
 - Apache Jackrabbit 2.14.4 and Jackrabbit Oak 1.6.6 released http://jackrabbit.apache.org/

Apache Juneau™ –Open Source framework for quickly and easily creating Java-based REST microservices and APIs.
 - The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache® Juneau™ as a Top-Level Project https://s.apache.org/IvJH 

Apache Kafka™ –Open Source enterprise-grade scalable streaming platform.
 - The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache® Kafka® v1.0.0 https://s.apache.org/8jww
 - Apache Kafka 1.0.0 released https://kafka.apache.org/

Apache Lucene™ –a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library written entirely in Java.
 - Solr Reference Guide for Solr 7.1 released https://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/lucene/solr/ref-guide/apache-solr-ref-guide-7.1.pdf

Apache MXNet (incubating) –a deep learning framework designed for both efficiency and flexibility.
 - Apache MXNet (incubating) 0.12.0 released http://mxnet.incubator.apache.org/

Apache OpenNLP™ –a Machine Learning-based toolkit for the processing of natural language text.
 - Language Detector Model 1.8.3 released http://opennlp.apache.org/

Apache PDFBox™ –an Open Source Java tool for working with PDF documents.
 - Apache PDFBox 2.0.8 released http://pdfbox.apache.org/

Apache Yetus™ –a collection of libraries and tools that enable contribution and release processes for software projects. 
 - Apache Yetus 0.6.0 released https://yetus.apache.org/

Did You Know?

 - Did you know that you can learn about Open Source governance, community leadership, open development, and more from dozens of members of the Apache community at FOSS Backstage Micro-Summit in Berlin on 20 November? https://berlinbuzzwords.de/17/news/foss-backstage-micro-summit-registration-open-now 

 - Did you know that Apache Struts has new documentation? http://struts.apache.org/docs/

 - Did you know that Yelp runs massively parallel integration tests on Apache Mesos with Task Processing? http://mesos.apache.org/


Apache Community Notices:

 - Foundation Statement –Apache Is Open. https://s.apache.org/PIRA

 - "Success at Apache" focuses on the processes behind why the ASF "just works". 1) Project Independence https://s.apache.org/CE0V 2) All Carrot and No Stick https://s.apache.org/ykoG 3) Asynchronous Decision Making https://s.apache.org/PMvk4) Rule of the Makers https://s.apache.org/yFgQ 5) JFDI --the unconditional love of contributors https://s.apache.org/4pjM 6) Meritocracy and Me https://s.apache.org/tQQh 7) Learning to Build a Stronger Community https://s.apache.org/x9Be 8) Meritocracy. https://s.apache.org/DiEo 9) Lowering Barriers to Open Innovation https://s.apache.org/dAlg 10) All My Roads Led to Apache https://s.apache.org/l9OO 11) Scratch Your Own Itch. https://s.apache.org/7Amk

 - Follow the ASF on social media: @TheASF on Twitter and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-apache-software-foundation (re-tweets/shares/likes most appreciated!)

 - Presentations from ApacheCon https://s.apache.org/Hli7 and Apache: Big Data https://s.apache.org/tefE are available; as well as videos https://s.apache.org/AE3m and audio recordings https://feathercast.apache.org/

 - Do friend and follow us on the Apache Community Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ApacheSoftwareFoundation/and Twitter account https://twitter.com/ApacheCommunity

 - The list of Apache project-related MeetUps can be found at http://apache.org/events/meetups.html

 - Apache community members share leadership best practices on Open Source governance, community leadership, open development, and more at FOSS Backstage in Berlin on 20 November 2017 https://berlinbuzzwords.de/17/news/foss-backstage-micro-summit-registration-open-now

 - Meet members of the Apache CloudStack community at the CloudStack European User Group on 21 November in Leipzig https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cloudstack-european-user-group-tickets-38657799519?aff=estw

 - Members of the Apache community will be out in force at Open Source Summit Paris 6-7 December 2017 http://www.opensourcesummit.paris/

 - ASF Quarterly Report: Operations Summary Q1 FY2018 https://s.apache.org/cEUm

 - ASF Annual Report is available at https://s.apache.org/FY2017AnnualReport

 - Find out how you can participate with Apache community/projects/activities --opportunities open with Apache HTTP Server, Avro, ComDev (community development), Directory, Incubator, OODT, POI, Polygene, Syncope, Tika, Trafodion, and more! https://helpwanted.apache.org/

 - Are your software solutions Powered by Apache? Download & use our "Powered By" logos http://www.apache.org/foundation/press/kit/#poweredby

= = =

For real-time updates, sign up for Apache-related news by sending mail to [email protected] and follow @TheASF on Twitter. For a broader spectrum from the Apache community, https://twitter.com/PlanetApache provides an aggregate of Project activities as well as the personal blogs and tweets of select ASF Committers.

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Wednesday November 01, 2017

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache® Kafka® v1.0.0

Popular Open Source enterprise-grade scalable streaming platform in use at Capital One, Goldman Sachs, ING, LinkedIn, Netflix, Pinterest, Rabobank, Target, The New York Times, Uber, Yelp, and Zalando, among others.

Forest Hill, MD —1 November 2017— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today the availability of Apache® Kafka® v1.0.0, the latest version of the Open Source distributed streaming platform.

Apache Kafka is capable of handling trillions of events per day, and provides a unified platform for handling real-time data feeds and scalable distributed applications. A single Kafka broker can handle hundreds of megabytes of reads and writes per second from thousands of clients.

"Apache Kafka is playing a bigger role as companies are moving to real-time streaming and embracing stream processing," said Jun Rao, Vice President of Apache Kafka. "The 1.0.0 release is an important milestone for the Apache Kafka community as we're committed to making it ready for enterprise adoption."

Initially conceived as a messaging queue, Kafka is based on an abstraction of a distributed commit log. Kafka provides low-latency, high-throughput, fault-tolerant publish and subscribe pipelines and is able to process streams of events. Kafka provides reliable, millisecond responses to support both customer-facing applications and connecting downstream systems with real-time data. Kafka is unique in that it can publish and subscribe to streams of data like a messaging system, process streams of data efficiently and in real time and store streams of data safely in a distributed, replicated cluster.

The Apache Kafka 1.0.0 release includes performance improvements with exactly-once semantics, significantly faster TLS and CRC32C implementations with Java 9 support, significantly faster controlled shutdown, and better JBOD support, among other general improvements and bug fixes. This release represents a significant milestone as companies run Kafka at enterprise scale with the ability to:
  • Publish and subscribe to streams of data at massive scale
  • Process streams of data with state of the art real-time stream processing capabilities and exactly-once semantics
  • Store streams of data durably for the long term

Apache Kafka is in use at large and small companies worldwide, including Capital One, Goldman Sachs, ING, LinkedIn, Netflix, Pinterest, Rabobank, Target, The New York Times, Uber, Yelp, and Zalando, among others.

"We enjoy Kafka's great features and vibrant community. Kafka enabled us to process trillions of messages per day in a scalable way. This opened up a completely new frontier for us to efficiently process data in motion to help us better serve Netflix members around the world," said Allen Wang, Senior Software Engineer at Netflix.

"Yelp uses Apache Kafka to power everything from application logs to analytics, enabling us to more easily and efficiently connect people with great local businesses," said Justin Cunningham, Software Engineer at Yelp. "The 1.0 release is a major milestone, and we're thrilled that Apache Kafka has continuously added innovative new features, while enhancing the reliability and scalability that Yelp depends on as our mobile traffic grows."

"Apache Kafka is Uber's data platform that reliably delivers trillions of messages per day, and empowers the real-time business intelligence to serve all the users around the world," said Lei Lin, Engineer Manager at Uber. "It's very exciting to see the new milestone of Apache Kafka 1.0 release and we are looking forward to this release."

"We invite everyone to download Apache Kafka 1.0.0 and try it out," added Rao. "We welcome community participation and look forward to engaging with users and hearing feedback at upcoming conferences and meetups as well as through the mailing list and pull requests."

Catch Apache Kafka in action at Kafka Summit 2018 in London and San Francisco https://kafka-summit.org/ , and at numerous local meetups https://kafka.apache.org/events .

Availability and Oversight
Apache Kafka software is released under the Apache License v2.0 and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. For downloads, documentation, and ways to become involved with Apache Kafka, visit https://kafka.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/apachekafka .

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 680 individual Members and 6,300 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Alibaba Cloud Computing, ARM, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cash Store, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Confluent, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, iSigma, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, ODPi, PhoenixNAP, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Produban, Red Hat, Serenata Flowers, Target, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Kafka", "Apache Kafka", 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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Tuesday October 31, 2017

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache® Juneau™ as a Top-Level Project

Open Source framework for quickly and easily creating Java-based REST microservices and APIs in use at IBM, The Open Group, and Salesforce, among others.

Forest Hill, MD –31 October 2017– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache® Juneau™ has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

Apache Juneau is a cohesive framework that allows developers to marshal POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects) and develop REST (Representational State Transfer) microservices and APIs. Marshalling is used to transform an object’s memory representation to a data format suitable for moving between different parts of a computer program (or across programs), and to simplify communications to remote objects with an object.

"We've worked hard on making the Apache Juneau code as simple and easy to use as possible," said James Bognar, Vice President of Apache Juneau. "We packed Juneau with rich features and functionality, and have successfully directed our efforts on building a diverse community that will help drive the project’s future. We’re very proud to graduate as an Apache Top-Level Project."

Apache Juneau consists of:

  1. A universal toolkit for marshalling POJOs to a wide variety of content types using a common cohesive framework;
  2. A universal REST server API for creating self-documenting REST interfaces using POJOs, simply deployed as one or more top-level servlets in any Servlet 3.1.0+ container;
  3. A universal REST client API for interacting with Juneau or 3rd-party REST interfaces using POJOs and proxy interfaces; and
  4. A REST microservice API that combines all the features above with a simple configurable Jetty server for creating lightweight standalone REST interfaces that start up in milliseconds.


Apache Juneau is in use at IBM, The Open Group, and Salesforce, among others. The Apache Streams project began incorporating Apache Juneau libraries in late 2016.

"Removing Dropwizard and Jackson in favor of Apache Juneau simplified our dependency tree, increased the performance of our APIs, and added several features, especially HTML rendering, that have been a huge hit," said Steve Blackmon, Vice President of Apache Streams. "An on-going collaboration between our projects continues to expand the capabilities of Juneau's Remoteable library. As Apache Streams adds additional data provider Java SDKs powered by Juneau, the variety of HTTP interfaces that can be modeled and integrated with Juneau has expanded."

"We were able to replace existing home-grown REST interfaces on top of EMF objects with ones based on Apache Juneau and dramatically reduced the size of our codebase," said Craig Chaney, former Jazz Repository team lead at IBM. "We also used it as the basis for our Docker-based microservices in our CLM-as-a-Service offering."

"I have used Apache Juneau on projects where I need to work with Web Services," said David Goddard, Executive IT Specialist at IBM. "Juneau has saved us many development hours, enabling me to easily consume third-party REST APIs and construct my own Web Services far more quickly than I would otherwise be able to. Juneau also aids the development of robust, maintainable applications with clear logical code structure."

"When The Apache Software Foundation moved the JSON.org license to Category X, successors for JSON processing were needed," said John D. Ament, Vice President of the Apache Incubator, and Apache Juneau incubation mentor. "Apache Juneau was identified as a clean solution. It provides an easy to use API, great performance and a large number of features that made it a strong recommendation for others to leverage."

"As Apache Juneau grows, we welcome new contributors to join the project and take an active role in its development," added Bognar. "Whether reviewing user code, helping with feedback, or contributing code changes through the mailing list, we look forward to learning more about usage patterns to further improve the product."

Meet members of the Apache Juneau community at the Salesforce Dreamforce 2017 conference 6-9 November 2017 in San Francisco.

Availability and Oversight
Apache Juneau software is released under the Apache License v2.0 and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. For downloads, documentation, and ways to become involved with Apache Juneau, visit http://juneau.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/ApacheJuneau

About the Apache Incubator
The Apache Incubator is the entry path for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the efforts at The Apache Software Foundation. All code donations from external organizations and existing external projects wishing to join the ASF enter through the Incubator to: 1) ensure all donations are in accordance with the ASF legal standards; and 2) develop new communities that adhere to our guiding principles. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF. For more information, visit http://incubator.apache.org/

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 680 individual Members and 6,300 Committers across six continents successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Alibaba Cloud Computing, ARM, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cash Store, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hewlett Packard, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, Inspur, iSIGMA, ODPi, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, PhoenixNAP, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Serenata Flowers, Target, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Juneau", "Apache Juneau", "Streams", "Apache Streams", 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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Friday October 27, 2017

The Apache News Round-up: week ending 27 October 2017

October has been a great month, filled with all sorts of successes. Here's what's happened over the past week:

Success at Apache –the monthly blog series that focuses on the processes behind why the ASF "just works".
 - Scratch Your Own Itch. by Ignasi Barrera https://s.apache.org/7Amk [also featured in JAX Magazine special issue on Open Source https://jaxenter.com/jax-magazine/issues/open-source-jax-mag-oct-2017 ]

ASF Board –management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws.
 - Next Board Meeting: 15 November. Board calendar and minutes http://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html

ASF Infrastructure –our distributed team on three continents keeps the ASF's infrastructure running around the clock.
 - 7M+ weekly checks yield strong performance at 99.75% uptime http://status.apache.org/

ASF Operations Factoid –this week, 450 Apache Committers changed 894,321 lines of code over 2,789 commits. Top 5 contributors, in order, are: Jean-Baptiste Onofré, Daniel Gruno, Stephen Mallette, Daniel Templeton, and Paul King.

Apache Commons™ Codec –provides implementations of common encoders and decoders such as Base64, Hex, Phonetic and URLs.
 - Apache Commons Codec 1.11 released http://commons.apache.org/codec/

Apache DB Derby™ –sub-project of the Apache DB project: a pure Java relational database engine which conforms to the ISO/ANSI SQL and JDBC standards.
 - Apache Derby 10.14.1.0 released http://db.apache.org/derby/

Apache Hive™ –Big Data warehouse that facilitates querying and managing large datasets residing in distributed storage.
 - Apache Hive 2.3.1 released https://hive.apache.org/

Apache HTTP Server™ –the most popular Web server on the planet.
 - Apache HTTP Server 2.4.29 released http://httpd.apache.org/

Apache Jackrabbit™ –a fully conforming implementation of the Content Repository for Java Technology API (JCR).
 - Apache Jackrabbit 2.15.7 and Jackrabbit Oak 1.7.10 released http://jackrabbit.apache.org/

Apache Lucene™ –a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library written entirely in Java.
 - Apache Lucene 5.5.5 and Solr 5.5.5 released https://lucene.apache.org/
 - CVE-2016-6809: Java code execution for serialized objects embedded in MATLAB files parsed by Apache Solr using Apache Tika http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-announce/201710.mbox/%3CCAOOKt51d8R6rkZHo%2BPUi7B70ER6ng0SvnsorzoufY5-z4iR_FQ%40mail.gmail.com%3E

Apache OpenNLP™ –Machine Learning-based toolkit for the processing of natural language text.
 - Apache OpenNLP 1.8.3 released http://opennlp.apache.org/

Apache OpenOffice™ –leading Open Source office application and personal productivity suite for Windows, Linux, and Mac.
 - Apache OpenOffice 4.1.4 released https://s.apache.org/ASF-AOO-414announcement

Apache Portable Runtime™ –software libraries that provide a predictable and consistent interface to underlying platform-specific implementations.
 - Apache Portable Runtime APR 1.6.3, APR-util 1.6.1 and APR-iconv 1.2.2 released http://apr.apache.org/

Apache PredictionIO™ –Open Source Machine Learning server used to manage and deploy production-ready predictive services.
 - The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache® PredictionIO™ as a Top-Level Project https://s.apache.org/GsTT

Apache Qpid™ Proton –a messaging library for the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol 1.0 (AMQP 1.0, ISO/IEC 19464, http://www.amqp.org).
 - Apache Qpid Proton 0.18.0 released http://qpid.apache.org/

Did You Know?

 - Did you know that Yelp runs high resource-cost integration tests at scale on Apache Mesos? http://mesos.apache.org/

 - Did you know that the Mahout based Universal Recommender runs on Apache PredictionIO? http://predictionio.apache.org/

 - Did you know that Salesforce uses Apache BookKeeper to store streaming log data? http://bookkeeper.apache.org/


Apache Community Notices:

 - Foundation Statement –Apache Is Open. https://s.apache.org/PIRA

 - "Success at Apache" focuses on the processes behind why the ASF "just works". 1) Project Independence https://s.apache.org/CE0V 2) All Carrot and No Stick https://s.apache.org/ykoG 3) Asynchronous Decision Making https://s.apache.org/PMvk4) Rule of the Makers https://s.apache.org/yFgQ 5) JFDI --the unconditional love of contributors https://s.apache.org/4pjM 6) Meritocracy and Me https://s.apache.org/tQQh 7) Learning to Build a Stronger Community https://s.apache.org/x9Be 8) Meritocracy. https://s.apache.org/DiEo 9) Lowering Barriers to Open Innovation https://s.apache.org/dAlg 10) All My Roads Led to Apache https://s.apache.org/l9OO 11) Scratch Your Own Itch. https://s.apache.org/7Amk

 - Follow the ASF on social media: @TheASF on Twitter and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-apache-software-foundation (re-tweets/shares/likes most appreciated!)

 - Presentations from ApacheCon https://s.apache.org/Hli7 and Apache: Big Data https://s.apache.org/tefE are available; as well as videos https://s.apache.org/AE3m and audio recordings https://feathercast.apache.org/

 - Do friend and follow us on the Apache Community Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ApacheSoftwareFoundation/and Twitter account https://twitter.com/ApacheCommunity

 - The list of Apache project-related MeetUps can be found at http://apache.org/events/meetups.html

 - ASF Quarterly Report: Operations Summary Q1 FY2018 https://s.apache.org/cEUm

 - ASF Annual Report is available at https://s.apache.org/FY2017AnnualReport

 - Find out how you can participate with Apache community/projects/activities --opportunities open with Apache HTTP Server, Avro, ComDev (community development), Directory, Incubator, OODT, POI, Polygene, Syncope, Tika, Trafodion, and more! https://helpwanted.apache.org/

 - Are your software solutions Powered by Apache? Download & use our "Powered By" logos http://www.apache.org/foundation/press/kit/#poweredby

= = =

For real-time updates, sign up for Apache-related news by sending mail to [email protected] and follow @TheASF on Twitter. For a broader spectrum from the Apache community, https://twitter.com/PlanetApache provides an aggregate of Project activities as well as the personal blogs and tweets of select ASF Committers.

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Wednesday October 25, 2017

Success at Apache: Scratch Your Own Itch.

By Ignasi Barrera

Recently I was at an industry conference and was happy to see many people stopping by the Apache booth. I was pleased that they were familiar with the Apache brand, yet puzzled to learn that so many were unfamiliar with The Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

It's important to recognize not just Apache's diverse projects and communities, but also the entity behind their success.

Gone are the days when software, and technology in general, was developed privately for the benefit of the few. As technology evolves, the challenges we face become more complex, and the only way to effectively move forward to create the technology of the future is to collaborate and work together. Open Source is a perfect framework for that, and organizations like the ASF carry out a decisive role in protecting its spirit and principles.

The ASF's mission is to provide software for the public good. We take it one step further, by giving all our Open Source software away for free. According to this mission, the foundation was established back in 1999 as a US 501(c)(3) non-profit charitable organization, and constitutes an independent legal entity to which companies and individuals can donate resources and be assured that those resources will be used for the public benefit. Its all-volunteer nature, along with the meritocracy model followed by its communities, are the pillars of the neutral, trusted space where Apache software is developed.

We strongly believe that good software is built by strong communities. Successful Open Source projects are the result of the work and collaboration in their communities and the people behind them. It is all about the people. Experience has shown us that helping people work together as peers is key in producing software in a sustainable way, and we have collected the lessons learned all these years in what we call "The Apache Way".

This Apache Way is a set of core behaviors all Apache projects follow that are designed to ensure projects are independent and diverse, and that anyone can participate no matter what gender, culture, time zone, employer, or even expertise they have. One can start collaborating with a project by contributing patches or implementing new features, but merit is not only measured by code contributions. Helping users, improving documentation, promoting the project, and other non-coding activities are very valuable and recognized as such, and the recognition of this merit and implication is expressed by granting more privileges in the project: from commit access, to invitations to join the Project Management Committee, to invitations to join the ASF Membership. One of the great differentiators between the ASF and other open source foundations is that the ASF does not dictate the technical direction of its projects: each Apache project is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides their respective project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Meritocracy drives the growth of the communities, and ensures anyone can contribute to projects that are ruled by the people who is involved and really cares about them.

Learning to work this way is not always easy, though. Projects come to the Foundation from very different backgrounds and whilst some of them already have communities that are used to collaborate in open ways, others find it challenging to embrace these core behaviors. The Apache Incubator is the main entry point for codebases and their communities wishing to officially become part of the Foundation, and is where they learn how to put all these principles in practice. Some will find this way of working a good way to rule a project and will graduate as an Apache top-level project, some may find that the Foundation is not the best option for them and choose to leave. Both options are good outcomes, as projects will have invested time in thinking about their community model and how they want governance to be, and this always benefits the Open Source world.

This Open Source model not only exists to create sustainable Open Source projects, but also to meet the expectations of the rest of the world. Software developed at Apache comes with a set of guarantees granted by the popular and business-friendly Apache License, but also with others that are the product of this open governance model, such as project independence or a well-defined project lifecycle. The ASF not only defines how projects operate while active, but also what happens when a project reaches its end-of-life, which is also important for adoption but often not considered by Open Source projects.

These guarantees, along with the reputation earned by many years of producing high-quality open source software, make the +300 freely available Apache projects, from Abdera to HTTP Server to Hadoop to Zookeeper, a trusted choice for individuals and companies looking for Open Source solutions.

The saying "Scratch Your Own Itch" is popular in the tech space, and is an integral principle at the ASF. Apache Committers have a responsibility to the community to help create a product that will outlive the interest of any particular volunteer, as well as for helping to grow and maintain the health of the Apache community.

As an ASF Member, I'm helping with project outreach and mentoring new individuals that make up the greater Apache community.

The Apache Software Foundation provides a safe place for Open Source development, and will keep evolving as technology evolves, welcoming all kinds of projects and communities, and helping people embrace Open Source. Let's see what the future holds for the Open Source world and how we can contribute to making it a better place. Scratch your own itch.


Ignasi Barrera is a long-term Open Source contributor and became involved with the ASF in 2013, when jclouds was first submitted to the Apache Incubator. He is a member of the Apache jclouds Project Management Committee and still actively contributes to the project. Ignasi became an ASF Member in 2015, and helps with community development activities and the promotion of Open Source. 

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"Success at Apache" is a monthly blog series that focuses on the processes behind why the ASF "just works". 1) Project Independence https://s.apache.org/CE0V 2) All Carrot and No Stick https://s.apache.org/ykoG 3) Asynchronous Decision Making https://s.apache.org/PMvk 4) Rule of the Makers https://s.apache.org/yFgQ 5) JFDI --the unconditional love of contributors https://s.apache.org/4pjM 6) Meritocracy and Me https://s.apache.org/tQQh 7) Learning to Build a Stronger Community https://s.apache.org/x9Be 8) Meritocracy. https://s.apache.org/DiEo 9) Lowering Barriers to Open Innovation https://s.apache.org/dAlg 10) Scratch your own itch. https://s.apache.org/Apah

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Tuesday October 24, 2017

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache® PredictionIO™ as a Top-Level Project

Open Source Machine Learning server used to manage and deploy production-ready predictive services at ActionML, BizReach, LiftIQ, Pluralsight, and Salesforce, among others.

Forest Hill, MD –24 October 2017– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache® PredictionIO™ has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

Apache PredictionIO is an Open Source Machine Learning Server that enables developers to manage and deploy production-ready predictive services for various kinds of Machine Learning tasks. 

"PredictionIO was started with the goal of democratizing Machine Learning, by providing a high-degree of customization through templates, using an integrated stack of proven technologies provided by other Apache and Open Source projects," said Donald Szeto, Vice President of Apache PredictionIO and Principal Data Engineer for Einstein at Salesforce. "It has been inspiring to see the project going through incubation, with a growing user and developer community who provided invaluable feedback and contribution. We are excited about our graduation, and look forward to continuing the project's goal with the help from the community."

Apache PredictionIO focuses on enabling developers to quickly develop and deploy production-ready Machine Learning pipelines. The project features an engine template gallery, where developers can pick a template, and quickly ramp up a complete setup for their Machine Learning use cases. Each template in the gallery is designed for a specific Machine Learning scenario.

Apache PredictionIO is in use at ActionML, BizReach, LiftIQ, Pluralsight, and Salesforce, among others.

"We are very interested in PredictionIO for solving any Machine Learning tasks," said Shinsuke Sugaya, Chief Scientist at BizReach, Inc. "At BizReach, using PredictionIO, we have built a data-analysis platform for HR, which fits learning models from about 5 million job descriptions and recommends preferred items from them to users everyday. PredictionIO has accelerated our analysis and development tasks for data scientists and developers, and simplified infrastructure from data management to prediction server."

"It was indeed an honor to be asked to mentor PredictionIO through its successful graduation out of the Apache Incubator," said Suneel Marthi, ASF Member and Apache PredictionIO Incubation Mentor. "Apache PredictionIO is the platform that fills the gap between academic research and productionizing Machine Learning-as-a-Service. As a long-time practitioner of Machine Learning involving large scale analytics, and Apache Mahout project committer for many years, I've enjoyed working with PredictionIO team, and can see myself coming back to this community for help with questions when using PredictionIO on the job."

"I'm excited to see Apache PredictionIO begin to gain the recognition it has truly earned," said Cody Kimball, Machine Learning Engineer at Pluralsight. "I was fascinated with the growing field of Machine Learning, but had no idea how to get started given my limited development experience. I had the opportunity at work to spearhead some marketing-related Machine Learning efforts, with a 9-month plan to get a working POC up and running. After only 12 weeks, using PredictionIO, I was able to build a fully functioning recommendation engine on our externally-facing Website. We soon saw a 29% increase in forms being filled out, which resulted in a 29% increase in new qualified sales leads, and projected $1,333 increase in MRR. We rolled out this POC test to just 10% of the Web traffic, with much more areas to improve on. This has opened up so many opportunities that never would have been possible had it not been for the availability and reliability of the PredictionIO platform!"

"Apache PredictionIO is a strategic platform that Data Scientists around the globe should learn to master!” said Shane Johnson, Founder and CEO at LiftIQ. “Our team of developers use PredictionIO at the core of our product architecture, and to power our Lift Intelligence Platform (LiftIQ, an app on Salesforce App Exchange). We have been super impressed with the flexibility of the framework: PredictionIO is built on a solid, progressive foundation and cuts Machine Learning development time in half. It allows developers to stay focused on tuning models and integrating Machine Learning with existing apps. The contributors and community are extremely active and helpful. We have had multiple challenges along our path to proving out our product. Each time we have reached out, we received responses from the community within minutes. Thank you PredictionIO team and community and congratulations on becoming an Apache Top-Level Project!"

"ActionML has been obsessed with Machine Learning for years. Some of us have been committers to Apache Mahout, for instance. Apache PredictionIO proved the missing link in putting ML into production for our more demanding clients, several of which are Fortune 500 companies," said Pat Ferrel, Chief Consultant at ActionML. "PredictionIO plays a key part in our story of 'Success at Apache' https://s.apache.org/l9OO "

"Salesforce is committed to making machine learning more accessible and empowering business users from companies of all industries and sizes to work smarter and be more productive. After donating PredictionIO's Open Source code to ASF, we've seen collaboration from several of our teams, as well as customers, ISVs and a wider community,” said Simon Chan, Senior Director, Product Management, Einstein. "Apache PredictionIO reaching Top-Level Project status will unlock the power of AI for companies large and small, empowering them to combine machine learning with their CRM to deliver smarter, more productive customer experiences."

"We welcome anyone who is passionate about our mission of bringing Machine Learning to the masses to join our effort," added Szeto. "Any feedback or contribution is invaluable to the project. Join the discussion on our user and development mailing lists."

Catch Apache PredictionIO in action at the Salesforce Dreamforce 2017 conference 6-9 November 2017 in San Francisco.

Availability and Oversight
Apache PredictionIO software is released under the Apache License v2.0 and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. For downloads, documentation, and ways to become involved with Apache PredictionIO, visit http://predictionio.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/PredictionIO

About the Apache Incubator
The Apache Incubator is the entry path for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the efforts at The Apache Software Foundation. All code donations from external organizations and existing external projects wishing to join the ASF enter through the Incubator to: 1) ensure all donations are in accordance with the ASF legal standards; and 2) develop new communities that adhere to our guiding principles. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF. For more information, visit http://incubator.apache.org/

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 680 individual Members and 6,300 Committers across six continents successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Alibaba Cloud Computing, ARM, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cash Store, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hewlett Packard, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, Inspur, iSIGMA, ODPi, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, PhoenixNAP, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Serenata Flowers, Target, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Mahout", "Apache Mahout", "PredictionIO", "Apache PredictionIO", 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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Friday October 20, 2017

The Apache News Round-up: week ending 20 October 2017

The week has zipped by and it's Friday already. Here's what we've been busy with:

ASF Board –management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws.
 - Next Board Meeting: 15 November. Board calendar and minutes http://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html

ASF Infrastructure –our distributed team on three continents keeps the ASF's infrastructure running around the clock.
 - 7M+ weekly checks yield on-point performance at 99.77% uptime http://status.apache.org/

ASF Operations Factoid –this week, 547 Apache Committers changed 1,377,543 lines of code over 3,399 commits. Top 5 contributors, in order, are: Varun Saxena, Jian He, Laszlo Puskas, Aditi Hilbert, and Stephen Mallette.

Apache Commons™ Compress –library that defines an API for working with compression and archive formats.
 - Apache Commons Compress 1.15 released http://commons.apache.org/compress/

Apache Commons™ Configuration –software library that provides a generic configuration interface which enables an application to read configuration data from a variety of sources.
 - Commons Configuration 2.2 released http://commons.apache.org/configuration/

Apache James™ –a 100% pure Java SMTP and POP3 Mail server and NNTP News server.
 - Apache James 3.0.1 security release http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-announce/201710.mbox/%3C18ce3ee5-d5cd-ea2a-6c03-fd1361fa0b99%40apache.org%3E

Apache Lucene™ –a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library written entirely in Java.
 - Apache Lucene 6.6.2 and 7.1.0, and Apache Solr 6.6.2 and 7.1.0 released https://lucene.apache.org/
 - CVE-2017-12629: Several critical vulnerabilities discovered in Apache Solr (XXE & RCE) http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-announce/201710.mbox/%3CCAOOKt51UO_6Vy%3Dj8W%3Dx1pMbLW9VJfZyFWz7pAnXJC_OAdSZubA%40mail.gmail.com%3E

Apache OpenOffice™ –leading Open Source office application and personal productivity suite for Windows, Linux, and Mac.
 - The Apache Software Foundation Announces Five Years of Apache® OpenOffice™ as a Top-Level Project https://s.apache.org/P2EH

Apache Pulsar (incubating) –a highly scalable, low latency messaging platform running on commodity hardware.
 - Apache Pulsar 1.20.0-incubating released https://pulsar.incubator.apache.org/

Apache Qpid™ Proton –a messaging library for the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol 1.0 (AMQP 1.0, ISO/IEC 19464, http://www.amqp.org).
 - Apache Qpid Proton-J 0.23.0 released http://qpid.apache.org/

Apache Rya (incubating) –a Cloud-based RDF triple store that supports SPARQL queries.
 - Apache Rya 3.2.11-incubating released https://rya.incubator.apache.org/


Did You Know?

 - Did you know that Europe's largest online fashion retailer Zalando uses Apache Kafka and Kafka Streams API for real-time fashion insights? http://kafka.apache.org/

 - Did you know that Pune Smart City uses Apache Wicket? http://wicket.apache.org/

 - Did you know that intelligent customer data platform Amperity uses Apache Aurora? http://aurora.apache.org/


Apache Community Notices:

 - Foundation Statement –Apache Is Open. https://s.apache.org/PIRA

 - "Success at Apache" focuses on the processes behind why the ASF "just works". 1) Project Independence https://s.apache.org/CE0V 2) All Carrot and No Stick https://s.apache.org/ykoG 3) Asynchronous Decision Making https://s.apache.org/PMvk4) Rule of the Makers https://s.apache.org/yFgQ 5) JFDI --the unconditional love of contributors https://s.apache.org/4pjM 6) Meritocracy and Me https://s.apache.org/tQQh 7) Learning to Build a Stronger Community https://s.apache.org/x9Be 8) Meritocracy. https://s.apache.org/DiEo 9) Lowering Barriers to Open Innovation https://s.apache.org/dAlg 10) All My Roads Led to Apache https://s.apache.org/l9OO

 - Follow the ASF on social media: @TheASF on Twitter and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-apache-software-foundation (re-tweets/shares/likes most appreciated!)

 - Presentations from ApacheCon https://s.apache.org/Hli7 and Apache: Big Data https://s.apache.org/tefE are available; as well as videos https://s.apache.org/AE3m and audio recordings https://feathercast.apache.org/

 - Do friend and follow us on the Apache Community Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ApacheSoftwareFoundation/and Twitter account https://twitter.com/ApacheCommunity

 - The list of Apache project-related MeetUps can be found at http://apache.org/events/meetups.html

 - The Apache community will be at All Things Open --stop by the ASF booth and say hello! 23-24 October in Raleigh https://allthingsopen.org/

 - Learn about Apache Atlas, AriaTosca (incubating), Hadoop YARN, Kafka, ManifoldCF, Ranger, Spot (incubating), Thrift, and more at Open Source Summit Europe + ELC Europe 2017 23-26 October in Prague https://osseu17.sched.com/

 - Catch the Apache Ignite and Spark communities at the In-Memory Computing Summit 24-25 October in San Francisco https://imcsummit.org/

 - ASF Quarterly Report: Operations Summary Q1 FY2018 https://s.apache.org/cEUm

 - ASF Annual Report is available at https://s.apache.org/FY2017AnnualReport

 - Find out how you can participate with Apache community/projects/activities --opportunities open with Apache HTTP Server, Avro, ComDev (community development), Directory, Incubator, OODT, POI, Polygene, Syncope, Tika, Trafodion, and more! https://helpwanted.apache.org/

 - Are your software solutions Powered by Apache? Download & use our "Powered By" logos http://www.apache.org/foundation/press/kit/#poweredby

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For real-time updates, sign up for Apache-related news by sending mail to [email protected] and follow @TheASF on Twitter. For a broader spectrum from the Apache community, https://twitter.com/PlanetApache provides an aggregate of Project activities as well as the personal blogs and tweets of select ASF Committers.

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