Why I Love The ASF

FAQ of FAQs about Apache Everything

Thu, 01 Feb 2018 11:22:33 +0000

Still having a hard time finding the right FAQ? Here’s a quick guide to finding the right FAQ for your Q!

How can I get involved at Apache?

Just get started by emailing your ideas or questions to an Apache project you’re interested in.It’s up to you to start - the best things to work on are ones you are interested in. The Community Development project is here to help point you in the right direction.

How can I become an Apache committer?

First - find a project you are interested in. The best way to get involved is to use an Apache software product that you have a reason to use (even if just curiosity), and then ask questions or submit code patches to that project’s mailing lists.

It’s all up to you - Apache projects run on merit, which means people who do more work on that project - as measured by the community - get more of a say.

How many Apache projects are there?

See all 190+ Apache software projects and read the developer information portal.

How do mailing lists work at Apache? Where should I email to ask questions?

Everything at Apache happens on archived mailing lists. Find the right list to use. Technical questions always go to that project’s dev@ list - every project is independent and separate. Or, to ask cross-project questions. Reading the Apache mail archives is a great way to see what other people are asking.

How is Apache software licensed? Is it free to use?

Apache software uses the Apache License, version 2.0. Questions? Contact the Legal Affairs Committee. Apache PMCs with specific questions: open a LEGAL Jira. All Apache software products are always free (no charge) to download and use.

Does Apache hold any trademarks or brands?

The ASF owns Apache trademarks, which include all Apache project and software product names and logos. Read useful trademark resources.

Where can I find press releases or analyst briefings?

Our Media and Analyst relations team runs @TheASF on Twitter and writes an official Foundation Blog.

Who does what at Apache?

See the ASF Org Chart of officers, find committers in the Apache people directory, read Planet Apache blogs.

How is the ASF organized? Is it a corporation?

The ASF is a 501C3 non-profit public charity. Members elect a Board of Directors that appoints Officers. Read about our governance and org chart.

How do I ask Infrastructure for help?

The crack Apache Infrastructure team runs everything, and protects our servers from rogue gnomes; you can contact Infra here. Remember: all questions about Apache software products should go to that project’s mailing list.

How do Apache projects work? What’s this Apache Way I’ve heard about?

Learn about The Apache Way, our community-led consensus behaviors that make Apache projects so efficient and long-lived, or view presentations about the ApacheWay.

Are donations to the ASF needed? Can I deduct them from my taxes?

Our non-profit relies on individual Donors and annual Sponsors for ourfunding and budgets. Donate today! (Often tax-deductible in the US!)

How do I get source code?

All code at Apache is freely downloadable from our Subversion or Git repositories. Learn how to Setup SVN or Git access.

Where else can I ask any questions about the ASF?

Apache Community Development (ComDev) volunters are here to answer any other questions you have about how Apache communities work. You can read all the past questions on the ComDev mailing list.

Where Do I Ask For Help Again?

Tue, 01 Mar 2016 11:22:33 +0000

More questions? Don’t just ask me - Apache is all about community, and the place for community at Apache is Apache Community Development!

Find Technology

List all 170+ Apache projects and read the developer information portal.

How To Contact Anyone

Everything at Apache happens on our mailing lists. Find the right list to use. Technical questions go to a project's dev@ list. Or, ask cross-project questions. Read the public list archives.

Your Ideas

Have another useful explanation or link? PR me on github!

ApacheCon Lightning Talks

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 11:22:33 +0000

ApacheCon is the official annual conference for all Apache projects and communities. On of our traditional evening events are the LightningTalks, where anyone is welcome to 5 minutes on the stage to speak informally on almost any topic. Beer and refreshments are served, and the 5 minute limit is strictly enforced. We have some technology talks about new projects, but usually our speakers are focused on communities and humorous stories.

Lightning Talk, ApacheCon, Budapest, 2015, Project Listing

Imagine this read in a really fast voice, like the old Federal Express fast talker ads - this is one of my traditional parts of a Lighning Talk, pointing out just how many projects are at Apache!

Zookeeper, Zest, Yetus XML Graphics, XMLBeans, Xerces, Xalan, Wookie, Wink, Wicket, Whimsy, Web Services, VXQuery, Velocity, VCL, UIMA, Tuscany, Turbine, Traffic Server, TomEE, Tomcat, Tiles, Tika, Thrift, Tez, Tcl, Tapestry, Tajo, Syncope, Synapse, Subversion, Struts, Stratos, Storm, STeVe, Stanbol, Sqoop, Spark, SpamAssassin, Sling, SIS, Shiro, Shindig, ServiceMix, Serf, Santuario, Samza, Roller, River, Rave, Qpid, Portals, POI, Pivot, Pig, Phoenix, Perl, PDFBox, Parquet, Orc, OpenWebBeans, OpenOffice, OpenNLP, OpenMeetings, OpenJPA, Open Climate Workbench, Oozie, OODT, Onami, Oltu, Olingo, OFBiz, ODE, Nifi, Nutch, MyFaces, MRUnit, MINA, MetaModel, Mesos, Maven, Marmotta, ManifoldCF, Mahout, Lucy, Lucene.Net, Lucene, Logging, Libcloud, Lens, Knox, Karaf, Kafka, jUDDI, JSPWiki, JMeter, Jena, jclouds, James, Jackrabbit, Ignite, Isis, HttpComponents, Hive, Helix, HBase, Hama, Hadoop, Gump, Gora, Giraph, Geronimo, Forrest, Flume, Flink, Flex, Felix, Falcon, Etch, Empire-db, Drill, Directory, DeviceMap, DeltaSpike, DB, CXF, Curator, cTAKES, Crunch, Creadur, CouchDB, Cordova, Continuum, Commons, Cocoon, CloudStack, Clerezza, Chukwa, Chemistry, Celix, Cayenne, Cassandra, Camel, BVal, Buildr, BookKeeper, Bloodhound, Bigtop, Axis, Avro, Aurora, Aries, Archiva, APR, Any23, Ant, Ambari, Allura, Airavata, ActiveMQ, ACE, Accumulo, Abdera, HTTP Server

About Apache: Starting Points For Every FAQ

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 11:22:33 +0000

How To Find The Right FAQ

Welcome

Apache Community Development is here to welcome you; see past questions on the mailing list.

Get Code

All Apache code is in our Subversion or Git repositories. How to Setup SVN or Git access.

Find Projects

See all 190+ Apache software projects and read the developer information portal.

Find People

Read the ASF Org Chart of officers, lookup the Apache committer directory, read Planet Apache blogs.

Contact Us

Everything happens on our mailing lists. Find the right list to use. Technical questions always go to a project's dev@ list. Or, ask cross-project questions. Read all Apache mail archives.

Legal Questions

Apache software uses the Apache License, version 2.0. Questions? Contact the Legal Affairs Committee. Apache PMCs with specific questions: open a LEGAL Jira.

Infrastructure Team

The crack Apache Infrastructure team runs everything, and protects our servers from rogue gnomes; you can contact Infra here.

The Apache Way

Learn about The Apache Way, our community-led consensus behaviors that make Apache projects so efficient and long-lived, or view presentations about the ApacheWay.

Donate Today

Our non-profit relies on individual Donors and annual Sponsors for ourfunding and budgets. Donate today! (Often tax-deductible in the US!)

Have another useful explanation or link, or a question not answered here? Submit a PR on github!

What Shane Does At Apache

Sat, 02 Jan 2016 11:22:33 +0000

Looking back, I’m often reminded at just how long I’ve been involved at the ASF. While the “Apache Group” formed in the 1990’s, before dot-com, the founders used email to share patches to one of the very original web servers. It wasn’t until 1999 that they incorporated the ASF, primarily at the time to provide a legal shield for their code contributions to what was becoming a very popular technology.

Early Committer At Apache

Shortly after incorporation, IBM and Sun jointly got together to donate all the parts of an XML/XSLT processing stack to the ASF as independent projects. Since my job was test lead for the LotusXSL processor, I then became a committer and PMC member in the brand new Apache Xalan project.

My first mail to an Apache mailing list was in November, 1999. Darn. I keep forgetting my first mail was about a mistake!

This was the very early days, when Apache wasn’t well known, and open source collaboration was a new field. I thought it was a great way to work, so I got involved volunteering beyond just testing for Apache Xalan. This work led me to volunteering for the Conferences Committee which organized ApacheCons in 2002, and shortly thereafter being elected as a Member of the ASF.

Membership Brings Visibility

With my newfound Member powers I got to explore how other early projects at the ASF worked like Jakarta and the conference world. I also volunteered in the early days of the Public Relations Committee (PRC), where a bunch of geeks tried to devise a way to do analyst and press relations themselves, without paying for any experts.

Conferences And Publicity

I spent a long time trying to figure out how to help, without overstepping my bounds. I joined the ApacheCon conference committee - called ConCom - and helped build and staff ApacheCons for a number of years. I also worked in the “PRC” committee, which was Apache’s early attempt to have a group of geeks try to do public relations and outreach. We did well, for what we were. But that wasn’t a sustainable model as the ASF grew.

Firing Myself

I’m proud to say that one of my first acts as the newly elected Chair and VP of Public Relations was to recommend to the board that my position and committee be dissolved! Instead, I worked with a number of other volunteer Members to form three new, separate committees with much better focus and documentation: Brand Management, Marketing & Publicity, and Fundraising. Those officer positions and corresponding mailing lists have continued through today, and are a much better structure for our volunteer help to interface with the various non-coding aspects of corporate operations.

Returning To The Board

Hmmm… I still need to write up some background on my tenures on the board - from the first year, where I was still amazed that people trusted me to be a ‘Director’, through the next few years realizing that governing an all-volunteer organization is hard work - and figuring out how we can do it better.

In any case, I’m running for the board again in 2017, and hope to be able to help the ASF continue to both grow, stay true to it’s roots, and to improve how we structure things so that volutneers can efficiently make sure operations work, without burning people out.

You can also Follow @ShaneCurcuru on Twitter.

Why Do I Love Apache?

Fri, 01 Jan 2016 11:22:33 +0000

You might be wondering: what the heck is Shane talking about, that he loves the ASF - the Apache Software Foundation - so much? He’s built this whole website about it, and even given a number of talks about this before. It’s kind of strange to love an organization, don’t you think?

The biggest point for me is the people. The Membership of the ASF is like a great big family. While everything else about the work of the AFS is important - the public charity; the way we work via consensus, not hierarchy; the cool projects and communities and technologies; and thie history - it’s really the people that keeps me volunteering at Apache.

While plenty of committers working on different projects are just there for the code, many of the Members and evangelists for the Apache are so much more involved with the community. It’s about finding better ways for groups of people to work together on shared goals - not just improving the code, but helping all of us improve the work we do with the technology.

And giving goofy Lighting Talks at ApacheCon. (more to come!)

I’ve met a lot of great people at ApacheCon throughout the years (since 2001), and hope to see people at ApacheCon/BigData, coming to Miami, Florida this 16-18 May 2017!