2 The Apache HTTP Server Project
4 http://httpd.apache.org/
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)
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
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 18 December 2001:
75 Greg Ames IBM Corporation, Research Triangle Park, NC, USA
76 Aaron Bannert Covalent Technologies, California
77 Brian Behlendorf Collab.Net, California
78 Ryan Bloom Covalent Technologies, California
79 Ken Coar IBM Corporation, Research Triangle Park, NC, USA
80 Mark J. Cox Red Hat, England
81 Lars Eilebrecht Freelance Consultant, Munich, Germany
82 Ralf S. Engelschall Cable & Wireless Deutschland, Munich, Germany
83 Justin Erenkrantz eBuilt, California
84 Roy T. Fielding Day Software, California
85 Tony Finch Covalent Technologies, California
86 Dean Gaudet Transmeta Corporation, California
87 Dirk-Willem van Gulik Covalent Technologies, California
88 Brian Havard Australia
89 Ian Holsman CNET, California
90 Ben Hyde Gensym, Massachusetts
91 Jim Jagielski jaguNET Access Services, Maryland
92 Manoj Kasichainula Collab.Net, California
93 Alexei Kosut Stanford University, California
94 Martin Kraemer Munich, Germany
95 Ben Laurie Freelance Consultant, UK
96 Rasmus Lerdorf Linuxcare, California
97 Daniel Lopez Ridruejo Covalent Technologies, California
98 Doug MacEachern Covalent Technologies, California
99 Aram W. Mirzadeh CableVision, New York
100 Chuck Murcko The Topsail Group, Pennsylvania
101 Sameer Parekh California
103 William A. Rowe, Jr. Covalent, Illinois
104 Wilfredo Sanchez Apple Computer, California
105 Cliff Skolnick California
108 Greg Stein California
109 Bill Stoddard IBM Corporation, Research Triangle Park, NC
111 Randy Terbush Covalent Technologies, California
112 Jeff Trawick IBM Corporation, Research Triangle Park, NC
113 Cliff Woolley University of Virginia
115 Apache Emeritus (old group members now off doing other things)
117 Rob Hartill Internet Movie DB, UK
118 David Robinson Cambridge University, UK
119 Robert S. Thau MIT, Massachusetts
120 Andrew Wilson Freelance Consultant, UK
122 Other major contributors
124 Howard Fear (mod_include), Florent Guillaume (language negotiation),
125 Koen Holtman (rewrite of mod_negotiation),
126 Kevin Hughes (creator of all those nifty icons),
127 Brandon Long and Beth Frank (NCSA Server Development Team, post-1.3),
128 Ambarish Malpani (Beginning of the NT port),
129 Rob McCool (original author of the NCSA httpd 1.3),
130 Paul Richards (convinced the group to use remote CVS after 1.0),
131 Garey Smiley (OS/2 port), Henry Spencer (author of the regex library).
133 Many 3rd-party modules, frequently used and recommended, are also
134 freely-available and linked from the related projects page:
135 <http://modules.apache.org/>, and their authors frequently
136 contribute ideas, patches, and testing.
138 Hundreds of people have made individual contributions to the Apache
139 project. Patch contributors are listed in the CHANGES file.
140 Frequent contributors have included Petr Lampa, Tom Tromey, James H.
141 Cloos Jr., Ed Korthof, Nathan Neulinger, Jason S. Clary, Jason A. Dour,
142 Michael Douglass, Tony Sanders, Brian Tao, Michael Smith, Adam Sussman,
143 Nathan Schrenk, Matthew Gray, and John Heidemann.
145 ============================================================================
147 How to become involved in the Apache project
149 There are several levels of contributing. If you just want to send
150 in an occasional suggestion/fix, then you can just use the bug reporting
151 form at <http://httpd.apache.org/bug_report.html>. You can also subscribe
152 to the announcements mailing list (announce-subscribe@httpd.apache.org) which
153 we use to broadcast information about new releases, bugfixes, and upcoming
154 events. There's a lot of information about the development process (much of
155 it in serious need of updating) to be found at <http://httpd.apache.org/dev/>.
157 If you'd like to become an active contributor to the Apache project (the
158 group of volunteers who vote on changes to the distributed server), then
159 you need to start by subscribing to the dev@httpd.apache.org mailing list.
160 One warning though: traffic is high, 1000 to 1500 messages/month.
161 To subscribe to the list, send an email to dev-subscribe@httpd.apache.org.
162 We recommend reading the list for a while before trying to jump in to
165 NOTE: The developer mailing list (dev@httpd.apache.org) is not
166 a user support forum; it is for people actively working on development
167 of the server code and documentation, and for planning future
168 directions. If you have user/configuration questions, send them
169 to users list <http://httpd.apache.org/userslist> or to the USENET
170 newsgroup "comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix".or for windows users,
171 the newsgroup "comp.infosystems.www.servers.ms-windows".
173 There is a core group of contributors (informally called the "core")
174 which was formed from the project founders and is augmented from time
175 to time when core members nominate outstanding contributors and the
176 rest of the core members agree. The core group focus is more on
177 "business" issues and limited-circulation things like security problems
178 than on mainstream code development. The term "The Apache Group"
179 technically refers to this core of project contributors.
181 The Apache project is a meritocracy -- the more work you have done, the more
182 you are allowed to do. The group founders set the original rules, but
183 they can be changed by vote of the active members. There is a group
184 of people who have logins on our server (apache.org) and access to the
185 CVS repository. Everyone has access to the CVS snapshots. Changes to
186 the code are proposed on the mailing list and usually voted on by active
187 members -- three +1 (yes votes) and no -1 (no votes, or vetoes) are needed
188 to commit a code change during a release cycle; docs are usually committed
189 first and then changed as needed, with conflicts resolved by majority vote.
191 Our primary method of communication is our mailing list. Approximately 40
192 messages a day flow over the list, and are typically very conversational in
193 tone. We discuss new features to add, bug fixes, user problems, developments
194 in the web server community, release dates, etc. The actual code development
195 takes place on the developers' local machines, with proposed changes
196 communicated using a patch (output of a unified "diff -u oldfile newfile"
197 command), and committed to the source repository by one of the core
198 developers using remote CVS. Anyone on the mailing list can vote on a
199 particular issue, but we only count those made by active members or people
200 who are known to be experts on that part of the server. Vetoes must be
201 accompanied by a convincing explanation.
203 New members of the Apache Group are added when a frequent contributor is
204 nominated by one member and unanimously approved by the voting members.
205 In most cases, this "new" member has been actively contributing to the
206 group's work for over six months, so it's usually an easy decision.
208 The above describes our past and current (as of July 2000) guidelines,
209 which will probably change over time as the membership of the group
210 changes and our development/coordination tools improve.
212 ============================================================================
214 The Apache Software Foundation (www.apache.org)
216 The Apache Software Foundation exists to provide organizational, legal,
217 and financial support for the Apache open-source software projects.
218 Founded in June 1999 by the Apache Group, the Foundation has been
219 incorporated as a membership-based, not-for-profit corporation in order
220 to ensure that the Apache projects continue to exist beyond the participation
221 of individual volunteers, to enable contributions of intellectual property
222 and funds on a sound basis, and to provide a vehicle for limiting legal
223 exposure while participating in open-source software projects.
225 You are invited to participate in The Apache Software Foundation. We welcome
226 contributions in many forms. Our membership consists of those individuals
227 who have demonstrated a commitment to collaborative open-source software
228 development through sustained participation and contributions within the
229 Foundation's projects. Many people and companies have contributed towards
230 the success of the Apache projects.
232 ============================================================================
236 Apache exists to provide a robust and commercial-grade reference
237 implementation of the HTTP protocol. It must remain a platform upon which
238 individuals and institutions can build reliable systems, both for
239 experimental purposes and for mission-critical purposes. We believe the
240 tools of online publishing should be in the hands of everyone, and
241 software companies should make their money providing value-added services
242 such as specialized modules and support, amongst other things. We realize
243 that it is often seen as an economic advantage for one company to "own" a
244 market - in the software industry that means to control tightly a
245 particular conduit such that all others must pay. This is typically done
246 by "owning" the protocols through which companies conduct business, at the
247 expense of all those other companies. To the extent that the protocols of
248 the World Wide Web remain "unowned" by a single company, the Web will
249 remain a level playing field for companies large and small. Thus,
250 "ownership" of the protocol must be prevented, and the existence of a
251 robust reference implementation of the protocol, available absolutely for
252 free to all companies, is a tremendously good thing.
254 Furthermore, Apache is an organic entity; those who benefit from it
255 by using it often contribute back to it by providing feature enhancements,
256 bug fixes, and support for others in public newsgroups. The amount of
257 effort expended by any particular individual is usually fairly light, but
258 the resulting product is made very strong. This kind of community can
259 only happen with freeware -- when someone pays for software, they usually
260 aren't willing to fix its bugs. One can argue, then, that Apache's
261 strength comes from the fact that it's free, and if it were made "not
262 free" it would suffer tremendously, even if that money were spent on a
263 real development team.
265 We want to see Apache used very widely -- by large companies, small
266 companies, research institutions, schools, individuals, in the intranet
267 environment, everywhere -- even though this may mean that companies who
268 could afford commercial software, and would pay for it without blinking,
269 might get a "free ride" by using Apache. We would even be happy if some
270 commercial software companies completely dropped their own HTTP server
271 development plans and used Apache as a base, with the proper attributions
272 as described in the LICENSE file.
274 Thanks for using Apache!
projects / apache / blob