From a day-to-day perspective, if you're a committer who just wants to develop on an existing project, or any user who just wants to run Apache software, who the Members (of the Foundation) are and what they do doesn't have much applicability. I'd bet the majority of people who contribute patches, participate on mailing lists, and what-not never give more than 2 or 3 brief thoughts to the organizations behind the scenes. Which is all fine, and IMO one of the great things about our license: use our software as you will, change it, sell it or give it away, just give us (the ASF) credit somewhere.
Sorry if I'm long-winded, I'm still tired from last week. And if you find this stuff boring, then feel free to stop reading; it probably doesn't matter to you. However (in my mind) having a strong interest in all this other organizational 'stuff' is a clear prerequisite for being a prospective Member.
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What is the Foundation? See apache.org/foundation/; formally, it is the "Apache Software Foundation", and it's a "membership-based, not-for-profit corporation" registered in the USA. This corporation - the entity itself - is the legal hook that everything else hangs off of.
The corporation can enter into business contracts just like any other business. Being a 501(c)(3) non-profit both carries certain restrictions as to how and what kinds of business we can do, as well as allowing US-based entities to take tax write-offs on donations they make to the corporation. (Sorry, I have no clue as to how this affects non-US folks vis-a-vis donation taxability!)
The corporation is also the owner of all of our IP (intellectual property). The corporation is the entity named at the top of our LICENSE, and therefore is the copyright owner of all of our code, documentation, etc.: anything that goes into the software we release.
So since the corporation actually owns all the code we produce, who controls the corporation? The Members are the shareholders of the corporation, and thus are the folks who legally set the strategic direction for the corporation as a whole. The Members have the power (see the bylaws) to: elect the Board of Directors; elect new Members; remove existing Members; amend the bylaws. So realistically, the Members have little direct power; it's really the Board that they elect that has the 'power'.
So who can be on the Board? Virtually anyone could be a Board candidate; they do not need to be a Member or anything else. (I'm not sure exactly how you get nominated to be a board candidate?) What does the Board do? They run the corporation, just like any other board of directors does with any other large corporation. In general, they only set strategic direction, and approve legal paperwork, and delegate most of the work to the Officers of the Corporation or the PMC's or to various committees that either the Board or President form (like infrastructure, fund-raising, etc.).
Who are the Officers of the Corporation? Some of them are appointed by the Board, like Chairman, President, Secretary, etc. The President is the CEO of the Corporation, and is responsible for running aspects of the Corporation that aren't handled by any of the PMC's. Likewise for Vice President, Treasurer, etc. Think of any other large corporation: officers here do the same kinds of things that officers in any corporation do. Officers and Board members are (I think) the only people implicitly authorized to speak on behalf of the Corporation, although they typically only do so when necessary.
The Board also appoints a Vice President of the Corporation to serve as the head of each Project Management Committee. Anyone can be appointed as an Officer of the Corporation like this, presuming that the Board believes they have the right qualities to be an officer. Note that other members of the PMC are *not* necessarily officers.
The V.P. of each project and their PMC are then responsible to the Board (and thus to the Corporation, and thus to the Members) to ensure that their project is managed appropriately. Essentially, all of this structure is just ensuring that we can show active oversight of the workings of each project.
Why do we need oversight? Because it's required to be a corporation. Yes, it really is, and no, we cannot cheat on this one. Does oversight include writing code, or discussing design strategies? No, not usually! It's mostly making sure that our projects are following the proper guidelines, voting on releases or code changes properly, and doing the paperwork to ensure that the Board gets quarterly reports on the status of all projects.
You say: but, hey: how can we have Officers who are not Members? Easy! It's very similar to any other large public corporation. Except instead of shares of stock in the corporation that can be traded (and hence the votes behind those shares traded), the ASF is a membership corporation. That means each individual member gets one vote, which is not transferable (as far as I can tell). But being a stockholder in a corporation has nothing directly to do with working for - or being an officer of - the corporation in question. Except at the ASF, Officers typically don't get paid. 8-)
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What makes up a good member? Partly, it's someone who has clearly shown over a period of time to have the best interests of the ASF as a whole in their heart. It's someone who doesn't just think about the particular code in their project(s), or who's using their project(s), or how their consulting business or employer can make use of existing ASF projects. It's someone who does think about where the ASF fits into the bigger picture: how can we change the world for the better thru community-driven software.
This is also partly a personal scale for each existing Member to decide. IMO, a potential member might be someone who's actually read thru this whole email and has some interesting questions about the bigger organizational points here. 8-)
- Shane And for the curious: xml-commons committer xml-xalan committer XML PMC member ASF member Conference Planning PMC member (yes, this is a PMC) Fund-raising committee
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