ASF Board Report 2007-09

This report, for September 2007, is the second 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, but there are some concerns from earlier board meetings about OFBiz that this report hopes to clarify on, and solicit a little feedback on too.

In response to the concerns expressed by the Apache Board in the last minutes for the meeting happened on 2007-06-20:

http://www.apache.org/foundation/records/minutes/2007/board_minutes_2007_06_20.txt

"The board expressed their concern that it appears that this new PMC already appears to have some community issues. J Aaron indicated his willingness to follow the project. It was noted that OFBiz has no ASF members involved nor any other committers who didn't join during incubation."

We would like to clarify some points:

- we don't think that the Board's perception of the project is correct, we have voted a bunch of new committers after the graduation (Adrian, Anil, Joe, Ray, Scott, Tim) and before that meeting and it is not completely true that we don't have ASF member involved in the project: David Welton and Yoav Shapira are in the PMC, even if they act as supervisor and are not active in the development of OFBiz.
- we have recently added two new PMC members (Scott and Jacques), while Si is no more a PMC member (but he is still an active committer, very involved in the project)
- a comment by David Welton (Apache Member and Member of the OFBiz PMC) sent to the OFBiz private list, in response to a discussion around those Minutes: "I'm still here, and follow what little goes through the PMC (it's good that most things happen on other lists!), and it all seems ok."
- we think everything is going well and the community is very active, lots of activity on the mailing lists, issue tracker, and in SVN
- it would be good to see what more specific concerns are coming up with the Board so we can either correct the misinformation (as with the no new committers or PMC members added, not sure how you got that because it's in the board reports), or find places for improvement

About the concern with no ASF members being really active in the project, that's a tricky one because we only see two possible solutions (either would be spectacular from our perspective!):

1) get OFBiz people invited to be members (however it happens naturally over time)
2) get ASF members interested in participating in OFBiz (there are a few, like Christian Geisert, that are involved and may move toward becoming committers and PMC members)

We welcome feedback on which of this is the best to pursue and how to best do these too.

In general the project is continuing very well. We are currently seeing around 400 commits per month, which is consistent with the last few months. The user and dev mailing lists are also seeing good (though down from some crazy months earlier this year) traffic with around 500-600 messages per month. New end users and production instances (the few that we find out about anyway) continue to come along and new faces are showing up on the mailing lists regularly. There is a steady slow growth trend in list subscribers, currently around 380 on the dev list, 515 on the user list, and 100 on the commits list.

The 4.0 release branch is in beta, with the branch around for nearly 5 months now. A lot of effort has gone into back-patching bug fixes, but the end-user population in still limited so we haven't pushed for a binary release. Time is moving on though, so in spite of that this should come along soon.