The Apache Way: MOSSCon 2013

1. The Apache Way
Rich Bowen
The Apache Software
Foundation

2. The Apache Way
A collaborative slidedeck with contributions
from ${ASF_Members}
(in particular Ross Gardler, Justin
Erenkrantz, Isabel Drost, Nick Burch, Jim
Jagielski, and Lars Eilebrecht)

3. What will we try to cover?
● How the foundation works
● How we develop code
● What we have found that works
● What hasn't worked so well...
● Business and Apache

4. But first, some history!

5. Informal Collaboration (1995)
● Apache Group
– 8 people
– sharing code on abandoned NCSA httpd
● Apache web server releases
– 0.6.2 (first public release) April 1995
– 1.0 released 1st
December 1995

6. A Foundation (1999)
● Commercial opportunities
– Formal legal structure required
● Membership based charity
– IRS 501(c)3
– Donations by individuals tax-deductible (in US)
● Virtual world-wide organization
● First ApacheCon March 2000
– Apache 2.0 Alpha 1
● First EU ApacheCon October 2000

7. Today
● Hundreds of projects
– Small libraries
– Critical infrastructure
– End user tools
● Well defined project governance
● Formal mentoring
● Accelerating growth

8. The ASF, By Numbers
● Projects = 113
● Incubating Projects = 34
● Board/President Committees = 10
● Board Members = 9
● Foundation Members = ~500
● PMC Committee Members = ~1500
● Committers = ~3400
● ICLAs = ~5100

10. Apache Projects
Abdera
Accumulo
ACE
ActiveMQ
Airavata
Ant
APR
Archiva
Aries
Avro
Axis
Buildr
BVal
Camel
Cassandra
Cayenne
Chemistry
Click
Cocoon
Commons
Continuum
CouchDB
Creadur
CXF
DB
Deltacloud
Directory
Empire-db
ESME
Etch
Felix
Flex
Flume
Forrest
Geronimo
Gora
Gump
Hadoop
Hama
HBase
Hive
HttpComponents
HTTP Server
Jackrabbit
James
Jena
JMeter
jUDDI
Karaf
Lenya
Libcloud
Logging
Lucene
Lucy
Mahout
ManifoldCF
Maven
MINA
MRUnit
MyFaces
Nutch
ODE
OFBiz
Oltu
OODT
Oozie
OpenJPA
OpenMeetings
OpenNLP
OpenOffice
OpenWebBeans
PDFBox
Perl
Pig
Pivot
POI
Portals
Qpid
Rave
River
Roller
Santuario
ServiceMix
Shindig
Shiro
Sling
SpamAssassin
STDCXX
Sqoop
Struts
Subversion
Synapse
Syncope
Tapestry
Tcl
Thrift
Tika
Tiles
Tomcat
TomEE
Traffic Server
Turbine
Tuscany
UIMA
Velocity
Web Services
Whirr
Wicket
Xalan
Xerces
XMLBeans
XML Graphics
ZooKeeper

11. Foundation Structure

12. Org structure
● Member-based corporation - individuals
only
● Members nominate and elect new
members
● Members elect a board - 9 seats
● Semi-annual meetings via IRC
● Each PMC has a Chair - eyes and ears of
the board (oversight only)

13. One way to view it

14. Another way
● A number of projects
● Each responsible for their own code,
community and direction
● Board provides oversight, but has no say
on what code gets written, what direction
projects take, what new projects we should
start etc
● Various support (eg infra, branding, press)
to help projects focus just on their code +
community

17. Labs
● Members can start new “scratch” projects
● Some graduate to TLPs (eg. Steve)
● Most languish in obscurity, but give a place
to work out interesting problems

19. Incubator
● Process for a project to enter the ASF
● Legal: Can we release the code under our
license?
● Community: Is the project sustainable?
● Educational: Do they know how we do
things?

20. Incubating Projects

22. Attic
● Graveyard?
● Landfill?
● Hopefully more like Grandma's attic where
you can find cool stuff and repurpose it
years later.

23. Not all “Plain Sailing”
● Jakarta “Foundation”
– Jakarta was an “Umbrella” for all Java projects
– Successful brand in its own right
● Tomcat, Struts, Ant and many more
innovations
● Started to copy foundation structure
– “Mini”-board … but problems arose …
– Avalon: Who was responsible?

24. Importance of Oversight
● Jakarta demonstrated that Umbrellas are
bad
– Flattened organisational structure
– Jakarta projects became top level projects
● All projects submit board reports quarterly
– Community focused
– Not technical focus
● Board can, and does (occasionally)
intervene
– On community issues only

25. The Apache Ecosystem

26. Bottom-up management
● Board does not say “we want X”
● Developers say “X is cool”
– We enable developers to do cool stuff
– Apache developers are at the forefront of
innovation
● Not interested in a single runner
– We want relay teams
– Community is critical to the Apache Way
● Apache is about support communities

27. Example: Git
● Various projects wanted to experiment with
Git, whereas we had traditionally used svn
● After much debate, Infrastructure provided
Git for projects to try out
● Board expressed concern about how it
might affect community dynamics, but in
the end it was up to the projects
themselves
● Projects now have the choice of SCM

28. So, why have a board?
● The board exists because the state of
Delaware requires a 501 to have oversight
● The Foundation exists to provide a
structure to
– Accept donations tax-free
– Do fundraising activities
– Sign contracts
– Hire employees
– Provide legal protection to projects

30. (nearly) All volunteer work
● If you want something done
– Volunteer on the appropriate committee
● A few paid contractors - all the stuff we're
bad at or don't want to do
– Press/Marketing
– Infrastructure/Sysadmin
– Administration/Conferences
● No paid committers

31. Meritocracy: The Apache Way

33. Types of contribution
● Any constructive contribution earns merit
– Permissively licensed only
● Not just code
– Evangelism
– Bug reports and triage
– Testing
– Documentation
– Design feedback
– User support
– Etc.

34. All contributions are equal
● Merit does not buy you authority
– The community must still agree
● Merit buys you privileges, e.g.
– Commit access
– Conflict resolution capabilities
● Community agrees on direction
● Individuals then make it happen

35. Decision Making
● Most decisions are reversible
● “If it didn't happen on the list, it didn't
happen”
● Uncontroversial or small changes
– Lazy Consensus – assume it's OK –
JFDI
● Controversial, irreversible or large changes
– Propose then wait a minimum of 72
hours

36. CTR/RTC
● Commit Then Review
– Small reversible changes
– Project in active development
● Review Then Commit
– Large or Controversial changes
– Stable/Maintenance branch

38. Finding that list
● Listed on project website
● dev@project.apache.org
– Primary list
● commits@project.apache.org
– Automated source change notification
● users@proejct.apache.org (optional)
– User-to-user support
● http://mail-archives.apache.org

39. No Jerks Allowed!
● Most people are nice
– We all have bad days
– Some are, well, Jerks
● Trolls exist
– DO NOT FEED
● Don't become a poisonous person
“How Open Source Projects Survive
Poisonous People (And You Can Too)” by
Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4216011961522818645

40. Community > Code
● More than just a clever slogan
● We can rewrite the code
● Poisonous people spoil the fun

41. However ...
● Many businesses rely on what we do for
fun. So it's important that projects be
– Sustainable (See: Diversity)
– Legal (patent, copyright, licenses, etc ...)
– Available (See: Infrastructure)

42. Business and the Apache Way

43. Ways to Contribute
● Documentation, Tutorials and Examples
● Helping others with queries and questions
● Issue / bug tracker triage
● Testing new fixes, helping reproduce
problems
● Bug Fixes and New Features
● Writing add-ons and extensions
● Mentoring, volunteering for the Foundation

44. Companies Contributing
● Everyone at Apache is there as an individual
● Companies can't buy access or committership
● To get involved, need to put employees to work
on the project, have them gain merit
● BDFLs are not allowed, everyone has an equal
voice
● Diversity of community means one company
can't dominate
● Means you can safely build your business on it

46. Mentorship - Multiply your impact

48. Permissive License

49. License
● Apache License
● Very permissive
● We encourage you to give back, but we
don't require it
● This makes it very business-friendly

50. In Summary
● It works!
● It's the best way we know of to develop
Open Source Software in a collaborative,
open and meritocratic way
● Some things can seem hard at first
● But there's normally a reason why
● Ask questions! Much is documented, but
not all, and not all in the same place
● Learn, participate, improve!

51. The Apache Way
Rich Bowen / @rbowen /
rbowen@apache.org
Thanks for listening! Questions?
A collaborative slidedeck with contributions from
Nick Burch, Ross Gardler, Lars Eilebrecht,
Justin Erenkrantz and Isabel Drost