A look at the Apache Software Foundation
Digital Incubator
© Lead Image © Aleksey Mnogosmyslov, 123RF.com
Apache incubates hundreds of major software projects and brings together thousands of developers – all without ensuing chaos. How do they manage it?
Apache projects such as Hadoop [1], Cassandra [2], Tomcat [3], and Spark [4] have enjoyed great popularity in data centers for years, but the venerable HTTP server [5] is the tool that laid the foundation of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) [6].
The HTTP daemon (httpd) from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) [7] was the precursor to the Apache server. Rob McCool worked at NCSA in the early 1990s and was awarded the contract to develop a web server that was not as complex as the one CERN preferred to use at the time. He collected the code in the fledgling Internet.
The server was pretty much neglected when McCool left NCSA to start a new job. Just a few users kept sending their own patches to keep it alive. Brian Behlendorf collected them, which is how "A patchy server" came to being. It remains unclear whether the Apache server is named after this play on words, or after the Native American tribal group.
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