ASF Board Report 2007-12

This report, for December 2007, is the third quarterly report (following the initial 3 monthly reports) for OFBiz (Open For Business) as a top level project.

The Open For Business Project (Apache OFBiz) is an open source enterprise automation software project. By enterprise automation we mean: ERP, CRM, E-Business / E-Commerce, MRP, SCM, CMMS/EAM, and so on.

We have no issues that require Board assistance at this time.

Community:

- two new PMC members have been voted in and are now listed in the committee-info.txt file: Anil Patel and Adrian Crum; both have been involved with OFBiz for quite a while and have contributed significantly and their experience and continued help is of great value to the project

- five new committers have been invited to join in based on their contributions and continued participation: Ashish Vijaywargiya, Bilgin Ibryam, Christian Geisert (an ASF member and committer on other Apache projects used in OFBiz), Marco Risaliti, and Vikas Mayur; all new committers are now setup except for Vikas Mayur as his iCLA just barely made it through

- the community and activity in the community are growing well; with new committers on the project and various contributors increasing their activity the project is seeing around twice the commit and mailing list activity as this time last year, and around half again as much from just the last quarter

Project:

- a number of stability issues have been fixed, and general database and transaction stability has been improved by moving from the old Minerva connection pool to using Apache DBCP

- enhancements and improvements, smaller iterative development, is going on throughout the project; this is one area where increased community size and involvement is having an impact

- the other areas that are seeing major improvement and new development from new contributors and people who have been contributing (and committing) for years are the accounting and project management component; with this new development OFBiz is able to more completely meet the needs of industries where the project is already strong and help the project apply to new industries that have previously not been well addressed