Apache Kibble Proposal

Abstract

Apache Kibble is an interactive activity aggregator: It tracks code,
community discussions, issues/bugs and people, and allows a detailed and
highly customizable look into the day-to-day, year-to-year activity of a
project, a sub project, a person or an entire organization.

Proposal

Kibble helps community driven software projects assess and analyze
project activity and trends. Kibble is based on the existing software
suite known as Snoot(tm), currently in use by the ASF.

Background and Rationale

The idea of Kibble was formed after a lengthy discussion about
proprietary software used to track open source software projects, and
the inevitable oxymoron therein. We (the initial group named below) wish
to establish a FOSS software suite for analyzing project activity and
trends, free for anyone to deploy and use.

Initial Goals

Establish a three-part software suite (through partly open-sourcing
existing proprietary software, and inventing new) for project
activity tracking and analysis:

  • Activity scrapers
  • Backend database service
  • Frontend visualization software

Current Status

The software exists as a proprietary service. We wish to convert this to
a FLOSS solution. The exact time-frame is currently unknown, and a
release date would be months away. The initial task of the project will
be to assess what exists, what we wish to have as an Apache software
project, and what to add/change.

Meritocracy

The initial PMC list covers folks from several established ASF
communities and several ASF members; they are all well acquainted with
the importance of building incremental project responsibility for new
contributors. Meritocracy will not be an issue. Seven out of the initial
nine contributors are ASF Members.

Community

There exists a large user-base of the software. It is our hope that we
can convert a great deal of these to contributors and testers for the
new open source product.

Core Developers

The initial set of developers come from a variety of ASF projects, as well
as one newcomer:

  • Daniel Gruno <humbedooh@apache.org>
  • Ulises Beresi <ucb@apache.org>
  • Daniel Takamori <pono@apache.org>
  • Sean Palmer <sbp@apache.org>
  • David Nalley <ke4qqq@apache.org>
  • Rich Bowen <rbowen@apache.org>
  • Sally Khudairi <sk@apache.org>
  • Christofer Dutz <cdutz@apache.org>
  • Sharan Foga <sharan@apache.org>
  • Herve Boutemy <hboutemy@apache.org>
  • Larry McCay <lmccay@apache.org>

Known Risks

Orphaned Products

The initial PMC are all (save one) involved actively in existing ASF
projects that make use of project activity tracking/aggregation
software. The risk of this dropping on the floor is minimal.

Inexperience with Open Source

All initial PMC members have an established record of working within ASF
projects.

Homogenous Developers

The initial set of developers are employed by a variety of companies,
located across the world, and used to working on a variety of
distributed projects.

Reliance on Salaried Developers

We do not expect the interest of the proposed initial PMC to be directly
tied to current employment, but will actively seek to grow our volunteer
base regardless.

Relationships with Other Apache Products

Not much to say here. Many ASF projects make use of the proprietary
offering, we wish to open source it and have people engage in the
development of the project.

Initial Source

The initial task of the PMC will be assessing what we wish the project to
contain. The proprietary vendor is willing to donate the software, but
considerable rewriting and relicensing will have to take place. This will
likely happen in stages, with the scrapers and UI being ported first,
and a backend auth system being partly ported/donated, and partly
developed from scratch at the ASF.

Source and Intellectual Property Submission Plan

All the existing code in question (from the Snoot suite) is owned by
Quenda IvS, and will be donated to the ASF.

External Dependencies

The current code base depends on incompatible licenses for
visualizations. We will work towards 100% compatibility with the Apache
License v/2.

Cryptography

Kibble will contain no special cryptographic components, though it does
rely on common tooling for SSL encrypted communication.

Required Resources

Mailing Lists

private@kibble.apache.org (moderated subscriptions)

commits@kibble.apache.org

notifications@kibble.apache.org

dev@kibble.apache.org

users@kibble.apache.org

Repositories

Issue Tracking

JIRA tracker with project KIBBLE

Other Resources

We have no other requirements at present.
We may require a VM at one point.

domain name:

https://kibble.apache.org

Initial PMC

  • Daniel Gruno <humbedooh@apache.org>
  • Ulises Beresi <ucb@apache.org>
  • Daniel Takamori <pono@apache.org>
  • Sean Palmer <sbp@apache.org>
  • David Nalley <ke4qqq@apache.org>
  • Rich Bowen <rbowen@apache.org>
  • Sally Khudairi <sk@apache.org>
  • Christofer Dutz <cdutz@apache.org>
  • Sharan Foga <sharan@apache.org>
  • Herve Boutemy <hboutemy@apache.org>
  • Larry McCay <lmccay@apache.org>

Affiliations

PMC members are employees of (alphabetically) ASF, HALO Worldwide, HortonWorks, Linux
Foundation, Quenda IvS, RedHat.

Sponsors

Champion

Daniel Gruno <humbedooh@apache.org>

Nominated Mentors

N/A

Sponsoring Entity

ASF Board. Note: this project is expected to go direct to TLP.

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