Funding Opportunity, custom Allura(s) for Cyber\Physical design

[Nicholas Bollweg <ni...@gmail.com>]

Hi folks:
I've been kind of quiet on the line for a good long time, but had the
opportunity to do some work back in 2011-12 on a custom Allura, which has
now been released, along with a raft of other interesting things:
http://cps-vo.org/group/avm

Here are the files themselves most related to Allura (under "Georgia Tech"
and "Vanderbilt University"):
http://cps-vo.org/node/5837/browser

Between the both of these, there is some interesting stuff:
- 3D CAD viewer... the multiuser part has a non-free dependency
- twitter-like thing
- VCS hooks (two different implementations!)
- theming stuff (some of which was already extracted out and is in Apache
Allura)
- project metadata search
- various model integrations

One of the suites received funding beyond the date of what is posted there,
so there may be updates to come. The license situation is tricky, as
nominally everything is MITish, but I doubt/know the code is well audited,
but I happen to know some of authors, and I am sure we can figure something
out :)

I would love to see as much as is relevant make it back into the upstream.

According to the timestamps, this happened a while back, but I've been off
doing other things, and it was only recently brought to my attention...
basically I was a bit gunshy of just pushing my code out until the sponsor
distributed it... government contracting around free software is funny.

Additionally, there is a current effort to transition these technologies
into "commercial tools," which does not preclude open source projects under
any definition I've ever heard, as long as somebody is getting paid:
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=09ca3c2daa2d854bbb6de7171cdc7f2e&tab=core&_cview=1

I would be interested in whether the community (either as we are, or as a
more formal partnership between companies and individuals that contribute)
would be interested in putting together a proposal (9-14pg, deadline: 4pm
Thursday, 31 Oct) to transition any of the technology created by these
previous efforts into Apache Allura proper.

I hope something of interest can come of this!

Cheers,
Nick

Re: Funding Opportunity, custom Allura(s) for Cyber\Physical design

[Nicholas Bollweg <ni...@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 12:11 PM, Dave Brondsema <da...@brondsema.net> wrote:

> Very exciting to see this finally out there.  We definitely should see if
> we can bring some of this back into Allura proper.
>
> I'd be happy to have extensions in the main Allura codebase if they are in
> pretty good shape, so that it's easier to keep them maintained and in
> working order.  Beyond that, I've been listing external extensions at
> https://forge-allura.apache.org/p/allura/wiki/Extensions/ but over time
> I'm sure there's more we can do to support that.
>
I do recall that thread from a while back.

The issue I see with some of the Tools in these two source dumps is that
they are pretty niche: bill of materials, CAD viewing, etc. And most bring
along some heavy requirement (XMPP, SPARQL, AWS/S3-like etc.) Others, like
either of the hook implementations, would be a good fit for inclusion in
master.

I think these contributions are somewhat outside of the normal use case of
Allura: it's more like developing towards something that would support a
hackerspace than a distributed software development organization.


> Can you elaborate on the proposal you mentioned?  Is it a grant  proposal?

Well, I'm kind of scratching my head as well, but figured I'd throw it out
there.

It is a proposal to win a contract, not a grant: presumably one of the
organizations involved would front the proposal, and we would get creative
on how it plays out re: the community: bounties? subcontracts? Anyhow,
there would be reporting requirements, deliverables, etc. and at the


> With the goal being to get funding to do the work necessary to work
> through the technical & legal work to merge these results into Apache
> Allura?
>
That's pretty much the idea. Here's the angle for the Apache Allura
community:

So DARPA invested some tens of millions in an MIT-licensed toolchain (AVM)
for doing complex engineering efforts. Their goal is now to seek...

"injection of AVM tool suite capabilities into existing PLM/CAE/MBE
> products that are already available on the commercial market".
>

DARPA doesn't sell software, but wants people to use the technology they
bought, so it is paying a number of organizations to put this open source
software into their products and distribute it, which strictly interpreted,
sounds like selling it.

As the upstream of the collaboration portion of the suite, Apache Allura
now provides an opportunity for some of these capabilities to reach a huge
number of users, but would require expanding the box as to what Allura
does: definitely more thingaverse than sourceforge, even though software is
still important to these efforts.

Re: Funding Opportunity, custom Allura(s) for Cyber\Physical design

[Dave Brondsema <da...@brondsema.net>]

Very exciting to see this finally out there.  We definitely should see if we can
bring some of this back into Allura proper.

I'd be happy to have extensions in the main Allura codebase if they are in
pretty good shape, so that it's easier to keep them maintained and in working
order.  Beyond that, I've been listing external extensions at
https://forge-allura.apache.org/p/allura/wiki/Extensions/ but over time I'm sure
there's more we can do to support that.

Can you elaborate on the proposal you mentioned?  Is it a grant proposal?  With
the goal being to get funding to do the work necessary to work through the
technical & legal work to merge these results into Apache Allura?

-Dave

On 10/10/13 3:04 PM, Nicholas Bollweg wrote:
> The Georgia Tech prototype is an "install on top" set of Tools, etc. that
> was last known to work with allura_20120717 that hasn't been touched since.
> Among the things we integrated are an XMPP server (ejabberd), a graph store
> (virtuoso), and a CAD kernel (openCAScade) but I don't have a dependency
> graph handy as to which of the tools needs them. We also did some work with
> getting Allura running on OpenShift, but ran into user quota issues that
> may or may not have been resolved since.
> 
> The Vanderbilt prototype is a hard fork from, say, December of 2011, is
> distributed as a tarball (instead of a repo), has rewritten significant
> chunks of the code, and may expect parts of OpenStack to be available. I
> haven't looked over it in earnest for a long time, so it would be a bit of
> archeology indeed.
> 
> On the whole I am pretty optimistic that things actually related to
> software development would be pretty easily portable, so maybe it would be
> worth looking at them on a tool-by-tool basis. Was there any
> progress/decision as to what the extension community would look like in the
> post-Apache era? Perhaps the right approach for the bulk of the code is as
> standalone Tool projects?
> 
> Cheers,
> Nick
> 
> 
> On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 1:53 PM, Wayne Witzel III <ww...@gmail.com>wrote:
> 
>> Hey Nick, this is great.
>>
>> Curious, have you guys been keeping things pretty up-to-date with master?
>> How hard do you think the merging could be to get these changes and
>> features back in to the Allura upstream.
>>
>> --
>> Wayne Witzel III (@wwitzel3)
>> wayne@pieceofpy.com
>> http://pieceofpy.com
>>
>>
>> On Thursday, October 10, 2013 at 11:18 , Nicholas Bollweg wrote:
>>
>>> Hi folks:
>>> I've been kind of quiet on the line for a good long time, but had the
>>> opportunity to do some work back in 2011-12 on a custom Allura, which has
>>> now been released, along with a raft of other interesting things:
>>> http://cps-vo.org/group/avm
>>>
>>> Here are the files themselves most related to Allura (under "Georgia
>> Tech"
>>> and "Vanderbilt University"):
>>> http://cps-vo.org/node/5837/browser
>>>
>>> Between the both of these, there is some interesting stuff:
>>> - 3D CAD viewer... the multiuser part has a non-free dependency
>>> - twitter-like thing
>>> - VCS hooks (two different implementations!)
>>> - theming stuff (some of which was already extracted out and is in Apache
>>> Allura)
>>> - project metadata search
>>> - various model integrations
>>>
>>> One of the suites received funding beyond the date of what is posted
>> there,
>>> so there may be updates to come. The license situation is tricky, as
>>> nominally everything is MITish, but I doubt/know the code is well
>> audited,
>>> but I happen to know some of authors, and I am sure we can figure
>> something
>>> out :)
>>>
>>> I would love to see as much as is relevant make it back into the
>> upstream.
>>>
>>> According to the timestamps, this happened a while back, but I've been
>> off
>>> doing other things, and it was only recently brought to my attention...
>>> basically I was a bit gunshy of just pushing my code out until the
>> sponsor
>>> distributed it... government contracting around free software is funny.
>>>
>>> Additionally, there is a current effort to transition these technologies
>>> into "commercial tools," which does not preclude open source projects
>> under
>>> any definition I've ever heard, as long as somebody is getting paid:
>>>
>> https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=09ca3c2daa2d854bbb6de7171cdc7f2e&tab=core&_cview=1
>>>
>>> I would be interested in whether the community (either as we are, or as a
>>> more formal partnership between companies and individuals that
>> contribute)
>>> would be interested in putting together a proposal (9-14pg, deadline: 4pm
>>> Thursday, 31 Oct) to transition any of the technology created by these
>>> previous efforts into Apache Allura proper.
>>>
>>> I hope something of interest can come of this!
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Nick
>>
>>
>>
>>
> 



-- 
Dave Brondsema : dave@brondsema.net
http://www.brondsema.net : personal
http://www.splike.com : programming
              <><

Re: Funding Opportunity, custom Allura(s) for Cyber\Physical design

[Nicholas Bollweg <ni...@gmail.com>]

The Georgia Tech prototype is an "install on top" set of Tools, etc. that
was last known to work with allura_20120717 that hasn't been touched since.
Among the things we integrated are an XMPP server (ejabberd), a graph store
(virtuoso), and a CAD kernel (openCAScade) but I don't have a dependency
graph handy as to which of the tools needs them. We also did some work with
getting Allura running on OpenShift, but ran into user quota issues that
may or may not have been resolved since.

The Vanderbilt prototype is a hard fork from, say, December of 2011, is
distributed as a tarball (instead of a repo), has rewritten significant
chunks of the code, and may expect parts of OpenStack to be available. I
haven't looked over it in earnest for a long time, so it would be a bit of
archeology indeed.

On the whole I am pretty optimistic that things actually related to
software development would be pretty easily portable, so maybe it would be
worth looking at them on a tool-by-tool basis. Was there any
progress/decision as to what the extension community would look like in the
post-Apache era? Perhaps the right approach for the bulk of the code is as
standalone Tool projects?

Cheers,
Nick


On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 1:53 PM, Wayne Witzel III <ww...@gmail.com>wrote:

> Hey Nick, this is great.
>
> Curious, have you guys been keeping things pretty up-to-date with master?
> How hard do you think the merging could be to get these changes and
> features back in to the Allura upstream.
>
> --
> Wayne Witzel III (@wwitzel3)
> wayne@pieceofpy.com
> http://pieceofpy.com
>
>
> On Thursday, October 10, 2013 at 11:18 , Nicholas Bollweg wrote:
>
> > Hi folks:
> > I've been kind of quiet on the line for a good long time, but had the
> > opportunity to do some work back in 2011-12 on a custom Allura, which has
> > now been released, along with a raft of other interesting things:
> > http://cps-vo.org/group/avm
> >
> > Here are the files themselves most related to Allura (under "Georgia
> Tech"
> > and "Vanderbilt University"):
> > http://cps-vo.org/node/5837/browser
> >
> > Between the both of these, there is some interesting stuff:
> > - 3D CAD viewer... the multiuser part has a non-free dependency
> > - twitter-like thing
> > - VCS hooks (two different implementations!)
> > - theming stuff (some of which was already extracted out and is in Apache
> > Allura)
> > - project metadata search
> > - various model integrations
> >
> > One of the suites received funding beyond the date of what is posted
> there,
> > so there may be updates to come. The license situation is tricky, as
> > nominally everything is MITish, but I doubt/know the code is well
> audited,
> > but I happen to know some of authors, and I am sure we can figure
> something
> > out :)
> >
> > I would love to see as much as is relevant make it back into the
> upstream.
> >
> > According to the timestamps, this happened a while back, but I've been
> off
> > doing other things, and it was only recently brought to my attention...
> > basically I was a bit gunshy of just pushing my code out until the
> sponsor
> > distributed it... government contracting around free software is funny.
> >
> > Additionally, there is a current effort to transition these technologies
> > into "commercial tools," which does not preclude open source projects
> under
> > any definition I've ever heard, as long as somebody is getting paid:
> >
> https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=09ca3c2daa2d854bbb6de7171cdc7f2e&tab=core&_cview=1
> >
> > I would be interested in whether the community (either as we are, or as a
> > more formal partnership between companies and individuals that
> contribute)
> > would be interested in putting together a proposal (9-14pg, deadline: 4pm
> > Thursday, 31 Oct) to transition any of the technology created by these
> > previous efforts into Apache Allura proper.
> >
> > I hope something of interest can come of this!
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Nick
>
>
>
>

Re: Funding Opportunity, custom Allura(s) for Cyber\Physical design

[Wayne Witzel III <ww...@gmail.com>]

Hey Nick, this is great.

Curious, have you guys been keeping things pretty up-to-date with master? How hard do you think the merging could be to get these changes and features back in to the Allura upstream. 

-- 
Wayne Witzel III (@wwitzel3)
wayne@pieceofpy.com
http://pieceofpy.com


On Thursday, October 10, 2013 at 11:18 , Nicholas Bollweg wrote:

> Hi folks:
> I've been kind of quiet on the line for a good long time, but had the
> opportunity to do some work back in 2011-12 on a custom Allura, which has
> now been released, along with a raft of other interesting things:
> http://cps-vo.org/group/avm
> 
> Here are the files themselves most related to Allura (under "Georgia Tech"
> and "Vanderbilt University"):
> http://cps-vo.org/node/5837/browser
> 
> Between the both of these, there is some interesting stuff:
> - 3D CAD viewer... the multiuser part has a non-free dependency
> - twitter-like thing
> - VCS hooks (two different implementations!)
> - theming stuff (some of which was already extracted out and is in Apache
> Allura)
> - project metadata search
> - various model integrations
> 
> One of the suites received funding beyond the date of what is posted there,
> so there may be updates to come. The license situation is tricky, as
> nominally everything is MITish, but I doubt/know the code is well audited,
> but I happen to know some of authors, and I am sure we can figure something
> out :)
> 
> I would love to see as much as is relevant make it back into the upstream.
> 
> According to the timestamps, this happened a while back, but I've been off
> doing other things, and it was only recently brought to my attention...
> basically I was a bit gunshy of just pushing my code out until the sponsor
> distributed it... government contracting around free software is funny.
> 
> Additionally, there is a current effort to transition these technologies
> into "commercial tools," which does not preclude open source projects under
> any definition I've ever heard, as long as somebody is getting paid:
> https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=09ca3c2daa2d854bbb6de7171cdc7f2e&tab=core&_cview=1
> 
> I would be interested in whether the community (either as we are, or as a
> more formal partnership between companies and individuals that contribute)
> would be interested in putting together a proposal (9-14pg, deadline: 4pm
> Thursday, 31 Oct) to transition any of the technology created by these
> previous efforts into Apache Allura proper.
> 
> I hope something of interest can come of this!
> 
> Cheers,
> Nick