Hey all,
hope this finds you well.
We, the Mifos community, want to propose our project for incubation.
Please find the proposal below.
= Fineract Proposal =
== Abstract ==
Fineract (\’fīn-,ə-ˌrakt\: A hypercube for digital financial services) is
an open source system for core banking as a platform. Fineract provides a
reliable, robust, and affordable solution for entrepreneurs, financial
institutions, and service providers to offer financial services to the
world’s 2 billion under and unbanked.
== Proposal ==
The aim of this proposal is to bring the Mifos X codebase and community
under the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) umbrella in order to help
coordinate the development effort of the growing number of organizations
which contribute to it, and give it the confidence of the neutral,
transparent, and open source governance policy of the ASF.
The name Mifos X will remain the property of the Mifos Initiative (a US
based 501(c)(3)) and will be used for a specific distribution of the
Fineract code. All development efforts of the Mifos Initiative will be
transferred to the Fineract project.
== Background ==
Mifos X is a mature and robust platform that provides loan, savings, and
business management functionality based on market proofed requirements. The
project was started in 2006 at the Grameen Foundation, initially creating
the Generation One solutions of Mifos 1 and Mifos 2, the industry’s first
open source and web-based MIS, to support the Joint Liability Group (JLG)
lending methodology created by Mohammed Yunus, which gained him and the
Grameen Bank the Nobel Peace Prize for his financial work in 2006.
In 2011 the independent Mifos Initiative, a 501(c)(3), was founded with two
goals:
1. Create the Generation Two solution Mifos X, an extensible API-driven
platform purpose built for Financial Inclusion
2. Build and govern an open source community of users, developers, and
service providers committed to using Mifos X for Financial Inclusion.
Since then a worldwide community of users, partners, and volunteers has
grown that utilizes, develops, and supports Mifos X. More than 40 partners
from Africa, India, China, South-East Asia and Latin America, with over 120
deployments and 3.5 million clients, have enhanced the platform based on
regional requirements and national regulatories.
== Rationale ==
Financial Inclusion - providing financial services to the world’s 2 billion
under and unbanked, enabling them to become a part of the global economy -
requires an affordable, reliable, scalable, and robust solution.
The adoption of mobile solutions and digital financial services is
increasing at an incredible pace and has led to an influx of new
innovators, financial institutions, and service providers into the
Financial Inclusion space and into the Mifos community which is growing at
an accelerating rate year-over-year since 2012.
Our rationale for joining the ASF is that as an Apache project we can
better manage the growth and governance of our community and provide the
community the confidence of sustainable long-term open source management,
which strengthens their commitment and continues the growth of our vibrant,
diverse community, collectively innovating around a single codebase,
sharing the social mission to eliminate poverty.
== Initial Goals ==
The initial goals of the Fineract transition under the ASF umbrella are to
establish a new home for an already fully functioning project, and also
make sure that the entire development community governs itself in the
Apache Way.
In addition, we will ensure:
1. All dependencies are compliant with the Apache License and the ASFs
licensing policies.
a. To become compliant a refactoring of the reporting module is
necessary to be able to swap out the Pentaho Reporting Engine. This work
will be undertaken during incubation.
2. Ongoing development based on our collaboratively established 2016
roadmap, and bring the process into the Apache Way.
3. Creating releases per Apache guidelines.
== Current Status ==
=== Meritocracy ===
We already have attributes of meritocracy embedded in our community.
* We have a developer email list which identifies active community members
who then become committers .
* On the user email list new features are introduced and discussed,
forming the product roadmap, and prioritization is based on merit and need.
* We have successfully graduated 13 Google Summer of Code interns, many of
whom have become long-term committers and developers to the project.
=== Community ===
There are more than a hundred developers within an active developer mailing
list. We have a large and growing installed base of users (financial
institutions) and a diverse eco-system of regional service partners who
support and deploy Mifos in their communities, and solution partners who
have built financial inclusion solutions on top of Mifos. The community has
held three annual conferences (2012, 2013, and 2015) where the community
gathers to connect implementers with developers, sharing their knowledge
to collaboratively build innovative solutions.
If Fineract is accepted by the Incubator, transitioning the community to
embrace the Apache Way of governance would be a primary initial goal. We
will solicit major existing developers to become committers on the project
from the beginning.
=== Core Developers ===
The core developers are a diverse group of individuals already very
experienced in open source development.
Edward Cable is a co-founder of the Mifos Initiative, and has established
the current community and governance model, Sander van der Heijden is the
CTO of Musoni Services, one of the first companies to create a commercial
product on top of the platform, that is completely mobile-based, and Markus
Geiss started as a volunteer and was appointed Chief Architect this year.
A broad base of committers around the Mifos developer team from Conflux
Technologies is made up of volunteers (e.g. Michael Vorburger, Product
Manager Design Studio at Temenos AG, Ishan Khanna a graduate student at
Bhagwan Parshuram Institute of Technology, or Terence Monteiro, Founder &
Director of SanJose Foundation) supporting and guiding contributors, and
governing the code base.
=== Alignment ===
Transition to ASF is a natural progression towards collaborative software
development and commercial-friendly standard licensing. Brian Behlendorf
and Zaheda Bhorat, both open source community leaders, in their role as
advisors for the Mifos Initiative, helped us to establish a community that
shares a vision based on a philosophy that is well aligned with the Apache
Way.
== Known Risks ==
=== Orphaned products ===
The community proposing Fineract for incubation is a strong and vibrant
open source project with a large installed base of users that is growing at
an increasing rate year-over-year from 2011 through 2015. In addition to
the commitment from the non-profit Mifos Initiative to move its development
efforts to the Fineract project, the size and diversity of the community is
a guarantee against the project being orphaned.
=== Inexperience with Open Source ===
We have managed Mifos as an open source project since inception. Every
release has been open source. We have open source community processes, such
as a developer mailing list, community conference calls, a collaborative
and transparent product roadmap, and an annual developer conference open to
all.
Our leadership has extensive open source experience. Our chairman, Paul
Maritz, was CEO of VMWare and CEO of Pivotal where he lead open source
initiatives at both companies. At Pivotal, he championed the Spring open
source framework and directed 3 Pivotal projects into Apache projects,
including Geode, HAWQ, and MADlib.
Our board member Dave Neary has spent 4 years with Red Hat, building their
open source developer community, and is a member of the GNOME Foundation
since 2004.
=== Homogenous Developers ===
The initial group of committers is heterogeneous when it comes to corporate
affiliations. The community is extremely diverse in terms of geography, the
backgrounds of developers, and the diversity of roles they play in the
community, such as users, regional support partners, and solution partners.
Since its inception, the entire community has contributed to the software
across a distributed and transparent infrastructure and environment.
=== Reliance on Salaried Developers ===
Our developer community consists of a mix of salaried developers who are
committed to the code base and volunteers.
The salaried developers work for (i) the Mifos Initiative, a 501(c)(3)
non-profit; (ii) financial institutions that use Mifos X; (iii) regional
service providers committed to financial inclusion that deploy and support
Mifos X in their communities; or (iv) solution partners that build and
distribute custom solutions on top of Mifos X.
We also have pure volunteers who contribute, often through hackathons and
corporate social responsibility programs such as Benetech’s Social Coding 4
Good, LinkedIn’s Day for Good, Google’s GoogleServe, ThoughtWorks Social
Impact Program, and VMware Take 3 Sabbatical program.
This diversity of roles and developers adds to the sustainability of the
project.
=== Relationships with Other Apache Products ===
Currently we are utilizing some Apache projects, like Tomcat, POI,
commons-lang, or HttpComponents, there are no additional relationships
right now. In 2016 further Apache projects, like Apache OpenJPA, and Apache
Geode, will be introduced to the project.
The platform is built on top of the Spring Framework, utilizing multiple
modules, like Spring Data, Spring Web, or Spring Security.
=== An Excessive Fascination with the Apache Brand ===
While we respect the reputation of the Apache brand we see a benefit for
both sides. We bring a stable and mature community with a deep rooted
social mission and are able to give Fineract a solid home as an open source
project following an established development model.
== Documentation ==
Information about Mifos X can be found at
https://mifosforge.jira.com/wiki/display/MIFOSX/Welcome+to+Mifos+X.
== Initial Source ==
Initial source is available on GitHub under the MPLv2 at
https://github.com/openMF/mifosx.
== Source and Intellectual Property Submission Plan ==
The Mifos Initiative owns all copyright to all contributions and has the
legal right to sign the ASF Software Grant Agreement. As soon as Fineract
is approved to join Apache Incubator, the source code will be transitioned
via the Software Grant Agreement onto ASF infrastructure and in turn made
available under the Apache License, version 2.0.
== External Dependencies ==
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Vendor | Library | License |
Compatible |
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Amazon.com, Inc. | AWS Java SDK | AL v2 | yes
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Apache Software Foundation | Commons | AL v2 | yes
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Apache Software Foundation | Tomcat | AL v2 | yes
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Apache Software Foundation | POI | AL v2 | yes
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Apache Software Foundation | HTTPClient | AL v2 | yes
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Ben Fortuna | iCal4j | BSD 3-clause | yes
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Boxfuse GmbH | Flyway DB | AL v2 | yes
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Bruce Dunwiddie^1^ | JavaCSV | LGPL v2.1 | no
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Google, Inc. | gson | AL v2 | yes
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Google, Inc. | guava | AL v2 | yes
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| iText Group NV | iText | MPL v1.1 | yes
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Jayway | JsonPath | AL v2 | yes
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Jayway | RESTassured | AL v2 | yes
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| JUnit | JUnit | EPL v1 | yes
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Michael Vorburger | MariaDB4J | AL v2 | yes
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Oracle, Corp. | JAX-RS | CDDL v1 | yes
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Oracle, Corp. | Jersey | CDDL v1.1 | yes
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Oracle, Corp.^2^ | MySQL Connector/J | GPL v2 | no
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Pentaho, Corp.^3^ | Reporting Engine | LGPL v2.1 | no
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Pentaho, Corp.^3^ | Reporting Library | LGPL v2.1 | no
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Pivotal Software, Inc. | Spring Boot | AL v2 | yes
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Pivotal Software, Inc. | Spring Framework | AL v2 | yes
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Pivotal Software, Inc. | Spring Security | AL v2 | yes
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Sam Pullar | Mustache | AL v2 | yes
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Square, Inc. | retrofit | AL v2 | yes
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Square, Inc. | okhttp | AL v2 | yes
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Stephen Colebourne | Joda-Time | AL v2 | yes
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Szczepan Faber | Mockito | MIT | yes
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Terracotta, Inc | Quartz | AL v2 | yes
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
| Terracotta, Inc | Ehache | AL v2 | yes
|
+----------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------+
* ^1^ = can be removed
* ^2^ = can be replaced
* ^3^ = need an abstraction on our side to become replaceable
== Cryptography ==
The only cryptography included by the project will be via library
inclusion, and will be used to encrypt stored user data on mobile devices
and in cloud storages.
== Required Resources ==
=== Mailing lists ===
* priv...@fineract.incubator.apache.org (moderated subscriptions)
* comm...@fineract.incubator.apache.org
* d...@fineract.incubator.apache.org
* u...@fineract.incubator.apache.org
=== Git Repository ===
https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator-fineract.git
=== Issue Tracking ===
JIRA Project Fineract (FINERACT)
=== Other Resources ===
* Project website (http://fineract.incubator.apache.org)
* Fineract Wiki pages (https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FINERACT
)
== Initial Committers ==
The following list comprises the current long term committers and does not
contain occasional developers.
* Vishwas Babu AJ (vishwas at confluxtechnologies dot com)
* Edward Cable (edcable at mifos dot org)
* Andrew Dzakpasu (andrewdzakpasu at musoni dot eu)
* Markus Geiss (mgeiss at mifos dot org)
* Sander van der Heijden (sander at musoni dot eu)
* Ishan Khanna (ishan1604 at gmail dot com)
* Myrle Krantz (mkrantz at mifos dot org)
* Terence Monteiro (terence at sanjosesolutions dot in)
* Adi Nayaran Raju (adi dot raju at confluxtechnologies dot com)
* Gaurav Saini (gsaini at apache dot org)
* Nazeer Hussain Shaik (nazeer dot shaik at confluxtechnologies dot com)
* Michael Vorburger (mike at vorburger dot ch)
== Affiliations ==
* Vishwas Babu AJ (Conflux Technologies)
* Ed Cable (The Mifos Initiative)
* Andrew Dzakpasu (Musoni Systems)
* Markus Geiss (The Mifos Initiative)
* Sander van der Heijden (Musoni Systems)
* Myrle Krantz (The Mifos Initiative)
* Terence Monteiro (SanJose Foundation)
* Adi Nayaran Raju (Conflux Technologies)
* Nazeer Hussain Shaik (Conflux Technologies)
== Sponsors ==
=== Champion ===
Ross Gardler
=== Nominated Mentors ===
* Ross Gardler
* Roman Shaposhnik
=== Sponsoring Entity ===
Incubator PMC
Cheers
*Markus Geiss*
Chief Architect
RADAR, The Mifos Initiative
mge...@mifos.org | Skype: mgeiss.mifos.org | Mobil: +49.152.295.05306 |
http://mifos.org <http://facebook.com/mifos>
<http://www.twitter.com/mifos>
