Had to hand write this one ... seems the report generator is currently defective, but as we reduced the numbers in the report anyway, it wasn't too much additional work ;-)
I did ad a bit mor personal part to the Community health part as I think the board should be aware of it. If I don't see any objections, I'll submit this in a few days. ## Description: The mission of the Apache PLC4X project is creating a set of libraries for communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a shared API. ## Issues: There are currently no issues requiring board attention. The previously reported absence of PMC activity seems to have disappeared. I am no longer concerned about this. ## Membership Data: Apache PLC4X was founded 2019-04-17 (almost 4 years ago) There are currently 19 committers and 13 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 5:4. Community changes, past quarter: - César García was added to the PMC on 2021-10-01 - No new committers. Last addition was Thomas Frost on 2021-05-07. ## Project Activity: The project has continuously been working on adding new features, fixing bugs, and improving existing code. Probably the most significant block of work has been the complete re-write of our code-generation core. In anticipation of more programming-languages coming to the project, we refactored and rewrote most of the code-generation to make it simpler to develop new code-generation templates. In the end all of this didn't change a single driver, but the overall usability of our tooling has improved as well as we lowered the entry-bar for folks coming into the project. ## Community Health: Project activity was low in December. In the beginning of January, I (Chris) posted a blog post [1], where I announced that I personally would be stopping to provide free community support for companies. This blogpost unexpectedly went viral. Online and offline news picked it up all over the world and reported about it in the context of the whole "sustainability of open-source" discussion. I did see one occasion where false news was spread (HackerNews reported Apache PLC4X was giving up free community support), but I think I managed to correct that. Besides that, it generally brought a lot of attention to the topic of open-source sustainability, but also to our project. Since then, we have seen a significant increase in page views to our website, to the github repository and we even got several new contributors sending pull-requests, bug reports, etc. There are also several companies willing to invest in PLC4X development. Admittedly now, I am really happy with the activity in the project. (I would have loved to provide numbers, but currently the board report tool seems defective) My general takeaway is, that it looks as if me stepping back a bit might even have been good for the project. I am not giving up on the project, I just switched to not instantly fix everything and rather help people reporting bugs into fixing them themselves and contributing this back. Perhaps projects in which one or a few individuals are excessively trying to keep all balls in flight is counter-productive with respect to developing a healthy community. [1] https://github.com/chrisdutz/blog/blob/main/plc4x/free-trial-expired.adoc
