The goal of this page is to document the history of the Apache Flex, starting with Adobe deciding to donate it to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), incubation and Apache Flex becoming a top level project.
It might be useful for other similar projects, or any incubating project, as an example of the steps involved in an Apache incubation.
See https://incubator.apache.org for the official Incubator documentation, and in particular the incubation process description page.
The decision is made within Adobe to incubate Flex at the ASF. Work starts on the incubation proposal, on explaining internally what this means, on the legal/IP clearance steps required to donate the code and on recruiting initial committers who will help get the project started.
The Flex Summit is organized to make the Flex community aware of the upcoming changes, and to allow initial Flex committers to sign up and network.
Among the available videos, these two provide interesting insights on how Apache projects work, by Roy Fielding, one of the ASF's founders:
The following blog posts provide other views on the event, and show that it was useful for the Flex community and for the upcoming Apache Flex project:
The Incubation proposal is submitted and discussed on the incubator-general mailing list, followed after a few days (once the discussion dies down) by the Incubator PMC vote mentioned below.
The list of incubation mentors is completed during the proposal's discussion phase, after asking for volunteers when submitting the proposal.
A few initial committers are also added during the discussion phase.
Project mentors need to be members of the Incubator PMC, ASF members just need to ask to get this membership.
Committers who are not (yet) Apache members need to be voted in by the Incubator PMC, which is done around December 22 for Anne and Dave.
The Incubator PMC vote lasts at least 72 hours, after which whoever started it tallies it. the vote for Flex passes on December 30th.
See for example the INFRA-4260 (create mailing lists) and INFRA-4262 (create JIRA instance) issues.
Flex is added to the Incubator's reporting schedule.
The Flex incubation status page is created.
People are invited to subscribe to the new Apache Flex mailing lists
Those lists are added to flex.markmail.org for convenience, using the markmail feedback form.
Discussions and consensus building start, including clarifications about the role of the PPMC, committers and community, whether to create roadmaps or just let things evolve organically, etc.
Mentors request creation of Apache accounts for the initial committers listed in the incubation proposal, after asking people which Apache ID they would like, avoiding collisions with existing IDs.
Initial committers, who are also PPMC members, are invited to subscribe to the Flex private mailing list (which is used for discussions about people, new committers etc. and as little as possible besides that) and made aware of the Apache guide for new committers.
Flex committers are granted write access to the subversion repository and JIRA issue tracker and can start actual coding work.
Adobe's software grant is received by the ASF's secretary, the Flex code can now be imported into Apache Flex's code repository.
Justin Mclean is the first Flex committer (besides the initial committers listed in the incubation proposal) to be voted in, after a short discussion and a vote on the Flex private mailing list, as per the incubator's instructions.
The legal/IP clearance work for that module is done on the Adobe side, that code is ready to be donated.
Apache recorded Adobe's donation documents for the source code to the next-generation Falcon compiler.
The source code for the Falcon compiler was committed to Apache's Subversion repository.
Apache Flex is voted in as a top level project at the December board meeting of the Apache Software Foundation.
After seven release candidates Apache Flex SDK 4.9 is released as the first release after becoming an Apache Software Foundation top level project.