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2 The Apache HTTP Server Project
4 http://httpd.apache.org/
6 February 2002
8 The Apache Project is a collaborative software development effort aimed
9 at creating a robust, commercial-grade, featureful, and freely-available
10 source code implementation of an HTTP (Web) server. The project is
11 jointly managed by a group of volunteers located around the world, using
12 the Internet and the Web to communicate, plan, and develop the server and
13 its related documentation. These volunteers are known as the Apache Group.
14 In addition, hundreds of users have contributed ideas, code, and
15 documentation to the project. This file is intended to briefly describe
16 the history of the Apache Group, recognize the many contributors, and
17 explain how you can join the fun too.
19 In February of 1995, the most popular server software on the Web was the
20 public domain HTTP daemon developed by Rob McCool at the National Center
21 for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
22 However, development of that httpd had stalled after Rob left NCSA in
23 mid-1994, and many webmasters had developed their own extensions and bug
24 fixes that were in need of a common distribution. A small group of these
25 webmasters, contacted via private e-mail, gathered together for the purpose
26 of coordinating their changes (in the form of "patches"). Brian Behlendorf
27 and Cliff Skolnick put together a mailing list, shared information space,
28 and logins for the core developers on a machine in the California Bay Area,
29 with bandwidth and diskspace donated by HotWired and Organic Online.
30 By the end of February, eight core contributors formed the foundation
31 of the original Apache Group:
33 Brian Behlendorf Roy T. Fielding Rob Hartill
34 David Robinson Cliff Skolnick Randy Terbush
35 Robert S. Thau Andrew Wilson
37 with additional contributions from
39 Eric Hagberg Frank Peters Nicolas Pioch
41 Using NCSA httpd 1.3 as a base, we added all of the published bug fixes
42 and worthwhile enhancements we could find, tested the result on our own
43 servers, and made the first official public release (0.6.2) of the Apache
44 server in April 1995. By coincidence, NCSA restarted their own development
45 during the same period, and Brandon Long and Beth Frank of the NCSA Server
46 Development Team joined the list in March as honorary members so that the
47 two projects could share ideas and fixes.
49 The early Apache server was a big hit, but we all knew that the codebase
50 needed a general overhaul and redesign. During May-June 1995, while
51 Rob Hartill and the rest of the group focused on implementing new features
52 for 0.7.x (like pre-forked child processes) and supporting the rapidly growing
53 Apache user community, Robert Thau designed a new server architecture
54 (code-named Shambhala) which included a modular structure and API for better
55 extensibility, pool-based memory allocation, and an adaptive pre-forking
56 process model. The group switched to this new server base in July and added
57 the features from 0.7.x, resulting in Apache 0.8.8 (and its brethren)
58 in August.
60 After extensive beta testing, many ports to obscure platforms, a new set
61 of documentation (by David Robinson), and the addition of many features
62 in the form of our standard modules, Apache 1.0 was released on
63 December 1, 1995.
65 Less than a year after the group was formed, the Apache server passed
66 NCSA's httpd as the #1 server on the Internet.
68 The survey by Netcraft (http://www.netcraft.com/survey/) shows that Apache
69 is today more widely used than all other web servers combined.
71 ============================================================================
73 Current Apache Group in alphabetical order as of 2 April 2002:
75 Greg Ames IBM Corporation, Research Triangle Park, NC, USA
76 Aaron Bannert California
77 Brian Behlendorf Collab.Net, California
78 Ken Coar IBM Corporation, Research Triangle Park, NC, USA
79 Mark J. Cox Red Hat, UK
80 Lars Eilebrecht Freelance Consultant, Munich, Germany
81 Ralf S. Engelschall Cable & Wireless Deutschland, Munich, Germany
82 Justin Erenkrantz University of California, Irvine
83 Roy T. Fielding Day Software, California
84 Tony Finch Covalent Technologies, California
85 Dean Gaudet Transmeta Corporation, California
86 Dirk-Willem van Gulik Covalent Technologies, California
87 Brian Havard Australia
88 Ian Holsman CNET, California
89 Ben Hyde Gensym, Massachusetts
90 Jim Jagielski jaguNET Access Services, Maryland
91 Manoj Kasichainula Collab.Net, California
92 Alexei Kosut Stanford University, California
93 Martin Kraemer Munich, Germany
94 Ben Laurie Freelance Consultant, UK
95 Rasmus Lerdorf Yahoo!, California
96 Daniel Lopez Ridruejo Covalent Technologies, California
97 Doug MacEachern Covalent Technologies, California
98 Aram W. Mirzadeh CableVision, New York
99 Chuck Murcko The Topsail Group, Pennsylvania
100 Brian Pane CNET Networks, California
101 Sameer Parekh California
102 David Reid UK
103 William A. Rowe, Jr. Covalent, Illinois
104 Wilfredo Sanchez Apple Computer, California
105 Cliff Skolnick California
106 Marc Slemko Canada
107 Joshua Slive Canada
108 Greg Stein California
109 Bill Stoddard IBM Corporation, Research Triangle Park, NC
110 Sander Striker The Netherlands
111 Paul Sutton Seattle
112 Randy Terbush Covalent Technologies, California
113 Jeff Trawick IBM Corporation, Research Triangle Park, NC
114 Cliff Woolley University of Virginia
116 Apache Emeritus (old group members now off doing other things)
118 Ryan Bloom California
119 Rob Hartill Internet Movie DB, UK
120 David Robinson Cambridge University, UK
121 Robert S. Thau MIT, Massachusetts
122 Andrew Wilson Freelance Consultant, UK
124 Other major contributors
126 Howard Fear (mod_include), Florent Guillaume (language negotiation),
127 Koen Holtman (rewrite of mod_negotiation),
128 Kevin Hughes (creator of all those nifty icons),
129 Brandon Long and Beth Frank (NCSA Server Development Team, post-1.3),
130 Ambarish Malpani (Beginning of the NT port),
131 Rob McCool (original author of the NCSA httpd 1.3),
132 Paul Richards (convinced the group to use remote CVS after 1.0),
133 Garey Smiley (OS/2 port), Henry Spencer (author of the regex library).
135 Many 3rd-party modules, frequently used and recommended, are also
136 freely-available and linked from the related projects page:
137 <http://modules.apache.org/>, and their authors frequently
138 contribute ideas, patches, and testing.
140 Hundreds of people have made individual contributions to the Apache
141 project. Patch contributors are listed in the CHANGES file.
142 Frequent contributors have included Petr Lampa, Tom Tromey, James H.
143 Cloos Jr., Ed Korthof, Nathan Neulinger, Jason S. Clary, Jason A. Dour,
144 Michael Douglass, Tony Sanders, Brian Tao, Michael Smith, Adam Sussman,
145 Nathan Schrenk, Matthew Gray, and John Heidemann.
147 ============================================================================
149 How to become involved in the Apache project
151 There are several levels of contributing. If you just want to send
152 in an occasional suggestion/fix, then you can just use the bug reporting
153 form at <http://httpd.apache.org/bug_report.html>. You can also subscribe
154 to the announcements mailing list (announce-subscribe@httpd.apache.org) which
155 we use to broadcast information about new releases, bugfixes, and upcoming
156 events. There's a lot of information about the development process (much of
157 it in serious need of updating) to be found at <http://httpd.apache.org/dev/>.
159 If you'd like to become an active contributor to the Apache project (the
160 group of volunteers who vote on changes to the distributed server), then
161 you need to start by subscribing to the dev@httpd.apache.org mailing list.
162 One warning though: traffic is high, 1000 to 1500 messages/month.
163 To subscribe to the list, send an email to dev-subscribe@httpd.apache.org.
164 We recommend reading the list for a while before trying to jump in to
165 development.
167 NOTE: The developer mailing list (dev@httpd.apache.org) is not
168 a user support forum; it is for people actively working on development
169 of the server code and documentation, and for planning future
170 directions. If you have user/configuration questions, send them
171 to users list <http://httpd.apache.org/userslist> or to the USENET
172 newsgroup "comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix".or for windows users,
173 the newsgroup "comp.infosystems.www.servers.ms-windows".
175 There is a core group of contributors (informally called the "core")
176 which was formed from the project founders and is augmented from time
177 to time when core members nominate outstanding contributors and the
178 rest of the core members agree. The core group focus is more on
179 "business" issues and limited-circulation things like security problems
180 than on mainstream code development. The term "The Apache Group"
181 technically refers to this core of project contributors.
183 The Apache project is a meritocracy -- the more work you have done, the more
184 you are allowed to do. The group founders set the original rules, but
185 they can be changed by vote of the active members. There is a group
186 of people who have logins on our server (apache.org) and access to the
187 CVS repository. Everyone has access to the CVS snapshots. Changes to
188 the code are proposed on the mailing list and usually voted on by active
189 members -- three +1 (yes votes) and no -1 (no votes, or vetoes) are needed
190 to commit a code change during a release cycle; docs are usually committed
191 first and then changed as needed, with conflicts resolved by majority vote.
193 Our primary method of communication is our mailing list. Approximately 40
194 messages a day flow over the list, and are typically very conversational in
195 tone. We discuss new features to add, bug fixes, user problems, developments
196 in the web server community, release dates, etc. The actual code development
197 takes place on the developers' local machines, with proposed changes
198 communicated using a patch (output of a unified "diff -u oldfile newfile"
199 command), and committed to the source repository by one of the core
200 developers using remote CVS. Anyone on the mailing list can vote on a
201 particular issue, but we only count those made by active members or people
202 who are known to be experts on that part of the server. Vetoes must be
203 accompanied by a convincing explanation.
205 New members of the Apache Group are added when a frequent contributor is
206 nominated by one member and unanimously approved by the voting members.
207 In most cases, this "new" member has been actively contributing to the
208 group's work for over six months, so it's usually an easy decision.
210 The above describes our past and current (as of July 2000) guidelines,
211 which will probably change over time as the membership of the group
212 changes and our development/coordination tools improve.
214 ============================================================================
216 The Apache Software Foundation (www.apache.org)
218 The Apache Software Foundation exists to provide organizational, legal,
219 and financial support for the Apache open-source software projects.
220 Founded in June 1999 by the Apache Group, the Foundation has been
221 incorporated as a membership-based, not-for-profit corporation in order
222 to ensure that the Apache projects continue to exist beyond the participation
223 of individual volunteers, to enable contributions of intellectual property
224 and funds on a sound basis, and to provide a vehicle for limiting legal
225 exposure while participating in open-source software projects.
227 You are invited to participate in The Apache Software Foundation. We welcome
228 contributions in many forms. Our membership consists of those individuals
229 who have demonstrated a commitment to collaborative open-source software
230 development through sustained participation and contributions within the
231 Foundation's projects. Many people and companies have contributed towards
232 the success of the Apache projects.
234 ============================================================================
236 Why Apache Is Free
238 Apache exists to provide a robust and commercial-grade reference
239 implementation of the HTTP protocol. It must remain a platform upon which
240 individuals and institutions can build reliable systems, both for
241 experimental purposes and for mission-critical purposes. We believe the
242 tools of online publishing should be in the hands of everyone, and
243 software companies should make their money providing value-added services
244 such as specialized modules and support, amongst other things. We realize
245 that it is often seen as an economic advantage for one company to "own" a
246 market - in the software industry that means to control tightly a
247 particular conduit such that all others must pay. This is typically done
248 by "owning" the protocols through which companies conduct business, at the
249 expense of all those other companies. To the extent that the protocols of
250 the World Wide Web remain "unowned" by a single company, the Web will
251 remain a level playing field for companies large and small. Thus,
252 "ownership" of the protocol must be prevented, and the existence of a
253 robust reference implementation of the protocol, available absolutely for
254 free to all companies, is a tremendously good thing.
256 Furthermore, Apache is an organic entity; those who benefit from it
257 by using it often contribute back to it by providing feature enhancements,
258 bug fixes, and support for others in public newsgroups. The amount of
259 effort expended by any particular individual is usually fairly light, but
260 the resulting product is made very strong. This kind of community can
261 only happen with freeware -- when someone pays for software, they usually
262 aren't willing to fix its bugs. One can argue, then, that Apache's
263 strength comes from the fact that it's free, and if it were made "not
264 free" it would suffer tremendously, even if that money were spent on a
265 real development team.
267 We want to see Apache used very widely -- by large companies, small
268 companies, research institutions, schools, individuals, in the intranet
269 environment, everywhere -- even though this may mean that companies who
270 could afford commercial software, and would pay for it without blinking,
271 might get a "free ride" by using Apache. We would even be happy if some
272 commercial software companies completely dropped their own HTTP server
273 development plans and used Apache as a base, with the proper attributions
274 as described in the LICENSE file.
276 Thanks for using Apache!