FOUNDATION OPERATIONS SUMMARY

First Quarter+, Fiscal Year 2017 (May-August 2016)

"The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has established itself as a positive yet impartial guardian, steward and evangelist for the greater good of the Apache software projects and its supporting and ancillary technology streams. Building a communicative platform of trust that links a decentralized software community this expansive is no small task. The ASF continues to be the ‘voice’ of Apache in an accessible, open and pragmatic way."
--Adrian Bridgwater, developer-centric technology writer for Computer Weekly, Forbes, The Register and others.


> President's Statement: This last quarter I have focused on expanding our operations capacity. Our mission is to provide software for the public good. We do this by providing services and support for many like-minded software project communities of individuals who choose to join the ASF. Those services and support are overseen by a team of volunteers who in turn are supported by a number of paid staff an contractors. The volunteers are the ones that make us less dependent on paid staff and thus keep our costs low and thus help us maintain the foundations independence from any financial source. However, as volunteers there are limitation on what we can expect in terms of time commitment. This is why our team of paid operations staff are so important.

We recently expanded our paid staff by appointing our first Infrastructure Administrator. This is a part time role aimed at assisting in the management of our infrastructure. This role will report to our volunteer VP of Infrastructure. This addition will help us maintain our excellent infrastructure uptime record (http://status.apache.org/) while keeping our expenditure to a minimum. It’s amazing that our infra team manage many hundreds of commits and pull requests and many thousands of emails each day. Not to mention hosting one of the top 1000 websites in the world (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/apache.org). All on a budget that is a tiny fraction of what most people would expect.

As a foundation we continually evaluate our ability to scale. With each new project we accept we increase our overheads. With each increase in overheads we make it harder to maintain our independence from sources of finance. Yet it is this independence that makes us successful as an open source software foundation. We remain in a very healthy financial position, however, it never hurts to take the opportunity to ask for your support. As an individual you can donate to the foundation (http://www.apache.org/foundation/contributing.html), as a corporation you can become a sponsor (http://www.apache.org/foundation/sponsorship.html).

> Events and Community: Since our last quarterly report, we have not held any additional ApacheCon events. We do, however, have one coming up very soon, and another in the beginning stages of planning. 

We will hold Apache Big Data Europe 2016, and ApacheCon Europe 2016, in Seville, Spain, November 14-18th, at the Melia Sevilla hotel. The we will be announcing the schedules for these events mid September. Details about these events may be found on the ApacheCon Website, at http://apachecon.com/ . In 2007, we plan to hold ApacheCon North America in Miami, May 15-19, at the Intercontinental Miami. Details will be published to the ApacheCon Website very soon. Sponsorship opportunities are still available for both events.

Meanwhile, we continue, as a larger community, to plan and attend an enormous number of meetups and other small events. You can see the weekly list of meetups at http://apache.org/events/meetups.html or by searching for your favorite Apache project on meetup.com.

> Committers and Contributions: Over the past quarter, 1,649 contributors committed 50,849 changes that amount to 53,203,721 lines of code across Apache projects. The top 5 contributors during this timeframe are: Mark Thomas (576 commits), Gary Gregory (573 commits), Andrea Cosentino (559 commits), and Reynold Xin and Claus Ibsen (473 commits each).

Part of onboarding new Apache committers is handled the ASF Secretary, who processes their paperwork so that they can continue contributing to our projects. 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. 

The Secretary processed 249 ICLAs, plus 12 CCLAs, and 5 Software Grants during this timeframe. The activity of Apache committers, and the community of contributors they serve, can be seen at http://status.apache.org/#commits


> Brand Management: Our Foundation-wide educational and policy improvement work continues to pay off, as more Apache projects are getting organized about maintaining and promoting their brands in a more organized fashion. Some projects are continuing work on their own detailed how-to guides for companies that want to *properly* use valuable Apache brands as part of their products or Web presences. However the rapid growth in new projects in the Incubator means that more help spreading the education to new communities is still needed.

Our detailed list of resources, both Apache policies as well as pointers to other valuable open source branding guidelines and information is improving our ability to respond, as seen by the more detailed questions we get from third parties, as well as by the ability of some experienced projects to handle brand enforcement more independently. http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/resources

While Open Source and the project communities are well understood in industry these days, open source *governance* and brand management are becoming more important topics. The ASF is seen as a leader in governance and brand policing, and our example is helping other FOSS communities as well as companies better understand how we can work together fairly and productively.

On the registration front, we continue to get some projects who request registration of names or beloved logos in the US and internationally. We continue to exercise financial care with our budget by working with the relevant project communities to detail why registration is important for them to attract new project contributors around the world.

With the continued rise of prominent Apache brands and projects that power more business every year, we look to the many companies that profit from Apache software products to help respect Apache brands. While many companies continue to properly give credit to our volunteer communities, sadly some companies continue to --or have started to-- take advantage of our non-profit work by unfairly co-opting Apache project brands.  Reviewing and correcting these mis-uses is an ongoing effort for the ASF and all Apache projects.

You can always ask the Apache Brand Management team private questions at trademarks@apache.org


> Infrastructure: The Infrastructure team continues to focus on retiring technical debt and improving the resiliency of the services we provide. We've spent a lot of the quarter restructuring our Buildbot and Jenkins infrastructure. This has made a noticeable effect in the uniformity of our build services, as well as the ease with which our projects are able to modify their build environments.

We're continuing to spend time recruiting additional help, and one of the first results of that is placing Greg Stein as the Infrastructure Administrator. (we should have a blog post for this in the coming days)

Additionally, our Github experiment has earned the 'uneventful' status this quarter, which we regard as a nice milepost pointing towards maturity. In the coming months we hope to be able to move this from experiment status to production workload. We expect this to have a large effect on a number of our project communities.

A complete view of the status of our infrastructure, with up-time graphs, can always be viewed at http://status.apache.org/


> Financial Statement:

Q1FY2017financialstatement


> Fundraising: The Apache Software Foundation continues to grow in a number of areas, as reflected in other areas of this report. On the Fundraising side we continue our efforts to keep an open channel with the current sponsors and as reaching out to new, potential sponsors that recognize the value of the ASF projects to the industry. The ASF achievements are outstanding, especially if we consider the relatively small budget that powers these achievements. Given our 501(c)(3) status, we heavily rely on the generosity of our sponsors for our operations.

The ASF enjoys the support of 7 Platinum Sponsors: Cloudera, Facebook, Google, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, Pivotal, and Yahoo; 8 Gold Sponsors: ARM, Bloomberg, Comcat, Hortonworks, HP, IBM, ODPi, and PhoenixNap; 13 Silver Sponsors: Alibaba Cloud Computing, Capital One, Cerner, Confluent, Budget Direct, Huawei, InMotion Hosting, iSIGMA, Private Internet Access, Produban, Red Hat, Serenata Flowers, and Wandisco. The number of Bronze sponsors has also increased, currently at 19 Bronze Sponsors and we continue to benefit from the generous help of our 11 Infrastructure Sponsors.

Given the growth of the Foundation, the VP of Fundraising is working on a few initiatives in collaboration with the VP of Marketing and Publicity meant to increase awareness of what we do. They will be announced in the upcoming quarterly reports as they get implemented.

As always, we want to take this opportunity again to express our gratitude to our sponsors for believing in and supporting the ASF mission. We wouldn't be where we are without the sponsor's generosity and for that they deserve our most sincere thanks!

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Report prepared by Sally Khudairi, Vice President Marketing & Publicity, with contributions by Ross Gardler, ASF President; Rich Bowen, Executive Vice President; Shane Curcuru, Vice President Brand Management; David Nalley, Vice President Infrastructure; Tom Pappas, ASF Member and Vice President, Finance & Accounting at Virtual, Inc.; and Hadrian Zbarcea, Vice President Fundraising.

For more information, subscribe to the announce@apache.org mailing list and visit http://www.apache.org/, the ASF Blog at http://blogs.apache.org/, and the @TheASF on Twitter.

(c) The Apache Software Foundation 2016.