ApacheCon EU 2014

A popular misconception in some circles is that Apache values policy so much that it effectively damages a project's opportunity to grow. Reality is, whenever the Apache policy gets in the way of a project something is wrong. But the current policy and practices were conceived as tools to help projects rather than damaging them. The incubation (and, later, the presence) of OpenOffice at Apache brought the need to rethink several policy issues and set precedents for new ones. In most cases, we found the solution by going back to the rationale for a policy and implementing it in the right way for our case. We'll see several examples of cases where policy was reinterpreted in order to help the project and not to obstacle it.

In 2013 the Municipality of Trieste (Italy) decided to migrate to Apache OpenOffice. The main goal was to adopt ODF as the document standard format for all the 1800 users on about 1550 PCs.
A change management approach, with a focus on the users to lower the changing barriers has been used. Davide Dozza will present the project activities and how technical, human resources and organization issues have been faced and addressed.
Moreover challenges on Apache OpenOffice adoption in enterprise environment will be discussed.

With Tomcat 8 recently being declared stable thoughts are turning towards Tomcat 9. This presentation will provide an early preview of what to expect in Tomcat 9. At the time of writing this abstract, the Servlet EG was just starting to discuss HTTP/2.0 (a.k.a. SPDY) and the WebSocket EG had previously discussed expanding the support for extensions. The presentation will provide an update on the direction being taken by each of the relevant specifications (Servlet, JSP, EL & WebSocket). There are also some major changes planned for some of Tomcat's non-specification features including the dropping of the BIO HTTP and BIO AJP connectors and the removal of Comet support. In addition to an overview of the current plan for Tomcat 9, this presentation will also provide information on how that plan is progressing.