Teaching to its Software the Way

And you are?

• Apache Member involved in– OODT (VP, PMC), Tika (VP,PMC), Nutch (PMC), Incubator (PMC), SIS

(Mentor), Lucy (Mentor) and Gora (Champion), MRUnit (Mentor), Airavata (Mentor)

• Senior Computer Scientist at NASA JPL in Pasadena, CA USA

• Software Architecture/Engineering Prof at Univ. of Southern California

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NASA Open Source Summit

NASA Open Source Summit

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http://www.nasa.gov/open/source/

The Apache Software Foundation

• Largest open sourcesoftware development entity in the world– Over 2600+ committers– Over 4100+ contributors– 94 Top Level Projects

• 57 Incubating• 32 Lab Projects• 16 retired projects in the

“Attic”

– Over 1.2M revisions

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-Over 10M successful requests served a day across the world

-HTTPD web server used on 100+ million web sites (52+% of the market)

Apache Maturity Model• Start out

with Incubation

• Grow community

• Make releases

• Gain interest• Diversify

• When the project is ready, graduate into– Top-Level Project (TLP)– Sub-project of TLP

• Increasingly, Sub-projects are discouraged compared to TLPs

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• Apache is a meritocracy– You earn your keep and your

credentials• Start out as Contributor

– Patches, mailing list comments, etc.– No commit access

• Move onto Committer– Commit access, evolve the code

• PMC Members– Have binding VOTEs on releases/personnel

• Officer (VP, Project)– PMC Chair

• ASF Member– Have binding VOTE in the state of the foundation– Elect Board of Directors

• Director– Oversight of projects, foundation activities

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Apache Organization

NASA Software• Having amazing, complex,

challenging software problems– A+

• Having brilliant, talented software engineers – A+/F (keeping them)

• Building software in a meritocratic, transparent, sustainable way– F

• Sharing Software between NASA centers– F

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Nerds want to be cool too

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Being him would be rad too

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We’re trying to avoid this

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Strength in numbers

Community building

Get social

No one organization controls the software

Gain merit, earn the commit bit, guide the software to its fruition

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Share software across centers

Most open license that there is (redistribution, attribution, commercialization)

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Apache central in notion of sustainability

Consensus not unilateral agreement

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Active triage=>quality

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My final plea

• Dear NASA:– Please do not create your own Apache Software

Foundation. Trust me, just because Forge.mil did it and just because the NIH is likely to do it, and just because people at NASA think you should do it, please don’t. Read about Apache. Try it out. Grow a community there. Realize you can have control (through meritocracy) and governance and sustainability and retain your talent by not reinventing the wheel and instead by leveraging what’s there at Apache. --Chris Mattmann

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P.S.

• Github is super cool but don’t be fooled by the cute Jedi cat.

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Disclaimer

• Opinions are my own.• Yes Matt Barkley should be in New York at the

Heisman ceremony (sorry Andrew Luck).• Questions?

– @chrismattmann on Twitter– chris.a.mattmann@nasa.gov

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