Wakefield, MA, March 26, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today its 20th Anniversary, celebrating "The Apache Way" of community-driven development as the key to its success.
The world's largest Open Source foundation is home to dozens of freely-available (no cost), enterprise-grade Apache projects that serve as the backbone for some of the most visible and widely used applications. The ubiquity of Apache software is undeniable, with Apache projects managing exabytes of data, executing teraflops of operations, and storing billions of objects in virtually every industry. Apache software is an integral part of nearly every end user computing device, from laptops to tablets to phones.
"What started before the term 'Open Source' was coined has now grown to support hundreds of projects, thousands of contributors and millions of users," said Phil Steitz, Chairman of The Apache Software Foundation. "The Apache Way has shown itself to be incredibly resilient in the wake of the many changes in software and technology over the last twenty years. As the business and technology ecosystems around our projects have grown, our community-based open development model has evolved but remained true to the core principles established in the early days of the Foundation. We remain committed to the simple idea that open, community-led development produces great software and when you make that software freely available with no restrictions on how it can be used or integrated, the communities that develop it get stronger. The resulting virtuous cycle has been profoundly impactful on the software industry as a whole and on those of us who have had the good fortune of volunteering here. When we celebrate fifty years, I am sure that we will say the same thing."
["ASF at 20" promo https://s.apache.org/ASF20 ]
Software for the Public Good
In 1999, 21 founders, including original members of the Apache Group (creators of the Apache HTTP Server; the World's most popular Web server since 1996) formed The Apache Software Foundation to provide software for the public good. The ASF's flagship project, the Apache HTTP Server, continues development under the auspices of the ASF, and has grown to serve more than 80 million Websites worldwide.
"The most successful revolutions are those birthed by Passion and Necessity. What keeps them going are Communities," said ASF co-founder Jim Jagielski. "Congratulations to the ASF and to everyone who has had a hand, large and small, in making it into who and what we are today."
The Apache Way
The open, community-driven process behind the development of the Apache HTTP Server formed the model adopted by future Apache projects as well as emulated by other Open Source foundations. Dubbed "The Apache Way", the principles underlying the ASF embrace:
- Earned Authority: all individuals are given the opportunity to participate, and their influence is based on pu ASF20th Anniversary-PrimaryLogoblicly-earned merit – what they contribute to the community. Merit lies with the individual, does not expire, is not influenced by employment status or employer, and is non-transferable.
- Community of Peers: participation at the ASF is done through individuals, not organizations. Its flat structure dictates that the Apache community is respectful of each other, roles are equal, votes hold equal weight, and contributors are doing so on a volunteer basis (even if paid to work on Apache code).
- Open Communications: as a virtual organization, the ASF requires all communications be made online, via email. Most Apache lists are archived and publicly accessible to ensure asynchronous collaboration, as required by a globally-distributed community
- Consensus Decision Making: Apache Projects are auto-governing with a heavy slant towards driving consensus to maintain momentum and productivity. Whilst total consensus is not possible to establish at all times, holding a vote or other coordination may be required to help remove any blocks with binding decisions.
- Responsible Oversight: the ASF governance model is based on trust and delegated oversight, with self-governing projects providing reports directly to the Board. Apache Committers help each other by making peer-reviewed commits, employing mandatory security measures, ensuring license compliance, and protecting the Apache brand and community at-large from abuse.
The ASF is strictly vendor neutral. No organization is able to gain special privileges or control a project's direction, irrespective of employing staff to work on Apache projects or sponsorship status.
The ASF Today
Behind the ASF is an all-volunteer community comprising 730 individual Members and 7,000 Committers stewarding 200M+ lines of code that benefit billions of users worldwide.
Lauded as one of the industry's most influential communities, the ASF develops and incubates 350+ Open Source projects and initiatives that are made available to the public-at-large at 100% no cost. The ASF has become an invaluable resource for users and developers alike, drawing 35M page views per week across http://apache.org/ ; 9M+ source code downloads from Apache mirrors (excluding convenience binaries), and Web requests received from every Internet-connected country on the planet.
"Over the past two decades, few institutions have been as important for the advancement and growth of Open Source as The Apache Software Foundation," said Stephen O'Grady, Principal Analyst with RedMonk. "By providing a neutral environment for developers from diverse backgrounds to work together, the ASF has played a pivotal role in the history of Open Source, and appears poised to continue in this role for the next decade."
All-Volunteer Community
The membership-based, not-for-profit charitable organization ensures that Apache projects continue to exist beyond the participation of individual volunteers by building diverse communities that develop and support software.
At the ASF, all software development and project leadership is executed entirely by volunteers. The ASF Board and officers are all volunteers. The ASF does not pay for development: thousands of committed individuals help make a difference to the lives of billions of people by ensuring that Apache software remains accessible to all.
The Apache maxim "Community Over Code" underscores that a healthy community is far more important than good code. In the event that the code would dematerialize, a strong community could rewrite it; however, if a community is unhealthy, the code will eventually fail as well.
The merit-driven "Contributor-Committer-Member" approach is the central governing process across the Apache ecosystem. The core Apache Group of 21 individuals grew with developers who contributed code, patches, or documentation. Some of these contributors were subsequently granted "Committer" status by the Membership, and provided access to: 1) commit (write) directly to the code repository, 2) vote on community-related decisions, and 3) propose an active user for Committership. Those Committers who demonstrate merit in the Foundation's growth, evolution, and progress are nominated for ASF Membership by existing members.
[please see charts at https://s.apache.org/ASF20thAnniversary ]
Powered by Apache
"The most popular Open Source software is Apache..."
— DZone "What Open Source Software Do You Use?"
Apache software is used in every Internet-connected country on the planet. Apache projects serve as the backbone for some of the world’s most visible and widely used applications in Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning, Big Data, build management, Cloud Computing, content management, DevOps, IoT and Edge computing, mobile, servers, and Web frameworks, among many other categories. Examples of the breadth of applications that are "Powered by Apache" include:
- Panama Papers: library, search, and document management tools used in the 2.6TB Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation;
- US Federal Aviation Administration: system-wide information management to enable every airplane take off and land in US airspace;
- Netflix: data ingestion pipeline and stream processing 3 trillion events each day;
- Uber: handling 1M writes per second for 99.99% availability to users and drivers;
- Mobile app developers: unifying mobile application development across Blackberry, Android, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone, and iOS operating systems;
- Facebook: processing requests at 300-petabyte data warehouse, connecting 2B+ active users;
- NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: accessing content across multi-mission, multi-instrument science data systems;
- Global Biodiversity Information Facility: managing 1B+ occurrence records for open access to data about all types of life on Earth;
- European Space Agency: powering new mission control system and next-generation simulators infrastructure;
- Adobe: powering I/O Runtime and the core of Experience Manager;
- IBM Watson: advancing data intelligence and semantics capabilities to win first-ever "Man vs. Machine" competition on Jeopardy!
- Boston Children's Hospital: linking phenotypic and genomic data for the Precision Link Biobank
- Target.com: driving $1B+ in revenue through Big Data optimization;
- AOL: ingesting 20TB+ of data per day;
- Minecraft: bundling libraries to modify the second most popular video game of all time;
- Novopay: serving as a transactional backbone to processes $80M+ each month;
- Formula 1, Audi, and Daimler: streaming data in vehicles in real time;
- Twitter: processing and analyzing more than a Zettabyte of raw data through 200B+ tweets annually;
- Pinterest: processing 800B+ daily events;
- Amazon Music: tuning recommendations for 16M+ subscribers;
- NASA: powering Big Earth and Ocean Science data analytics;
And, from Accumulo to Zipkin (incubating), more than six dozen Apache projects form the foundation of the $166B Big Data ecosystem.
Apache software is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases.
The Code
Over the past two decades, 1,058,321,099 lines of Apache code were committed over 3,022,836 commits. The ASF codebase is conservatively valued at least $20B, using the COCOMO 2 model. All Apache software is released under the Apache License v2.0.
[please see chart at https://s.apache.org/ASF20thAnniversary ]
"If It Didn't Happen On-list...It Didn't Happen"
Since the ASF's founding, 351,067 authors sent 19,587,835 emails on 8,529,590 topics across 1,131 mailing lists.
[please see chart at https://s.apache.org/ASF20thAnniversary ]
Apache Incubator
The Apache Incubator is the entry path for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the efforts at The Apache Software Foundation. All code donations from external organizations and existing external projects enter through the Incubator to: 1) ensure all donations are in accordance with the ASF legal standards; and 2) develop new communities that adhere to our guiding principles. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects.
Since the ASF's founding, 199 projects have successfully graduated from the Apache Incubator. Today, 52 projects are in development, applying The Apache Way to innovations in annotation, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, cryptography, data science, development environments, Edge and IoT, email; JavaEE, libraries, Machine Learning, serverless computing, and many more categories.
"Wow, is it 20 years already? Congratulations to the ASF! I've always been a big believer and advocate of Open Source, but when we founded the ASF 20 years ago I certainly didn't expect *this* level of growth and success," said ASF co-founder Lars Eilebrecht. "I'm very proud that the ASF - despite many challenges - has remained true to its core values and the Apache Way of Open Source development. The ASF has had a very big and positive impact on the overall IT industry, and I'm certain that the industry and the Internet would look very different today without the ASF's involvement in the rise of Open Source!"
Apache License v2.0
"Apache-style licensing may yield more adoption and money."
— Matt Asay, c|net
The commercially-friendly and permissive Apache License v2.0 has become an Open Source industry standard. Its popularity has led to the rise in corporate contribution in Open Source, and is behind the launch of dozens of billion dollar companies, and is facilitating the adoption of some of the world's fastest-growing Open Source projects.
"I'd like to congratulate the Apache Software Foundation for growing and demonstrating a working model for open source development that has stood the test of time," said ASF co-founder Randy Terbush. "I am forever grateful for the opportunities that my participation in the ASF gave me and I am very proud of what the group has become."
ApacheCon
Pre-dating the ASF, ApacheCon is the official global conference series of The Apache Software Foundation. Heralding "Tomorrow's Technology Today" since 1998, participants learn about Open Source development "The Apache Way", independent of business interests, corporate biases, or sales pitches. ApacheCon presents dynamic, community-driven content and innovation insight through hands-on sessions, keynotes, real-world case studies, trainings, hackathons, BarCamps, and more. The ASF is holding four events in 2019:
- Apache Roadshow/Washington DC 25, March 2019
- Apache Roadshow/Chicago, 13-14 May 2019
- ApacheCon North America/Las Vegas, 9-12 September 2019
- ApacheCon Europe/Berlin, 22-24 October 2019
For more information and to register, visit http://apachecon.com/ and ApacheCon video http://s.apache.org/ApacheCon .
"My Apache journey started in the Apache HTTP core development team in 1995, fixing security issues and continues today as VP of Security," said ASF co-founder Mark Cox. "In the years between, Apache has inextricably intertwined my professional career and my personal life. I'm proud to be part of the ASF as we move past 20 years and look forward to a celebration (hopefully with cake) at ApacheCon in September."
"Happy Birthday, Apache Group!" echoed ASF co-founder Bill Stoddard.
Support Apache
As a United States private, 501(c)(3) not-for-profit charitable organization, the ASF relies on charitable donations to advance the future of open development. The ASF is sustained by through tax-deductible contributions from generous corporations, foundations, and individuals, whose contributions help offset day-to-day operating expenses that include bandwidth, connectivity, servers, hardware, legal counsel, accounting services, trademark protection, public relations, marketing, and related support staff. Less than 10% is spent on overhead.
The Apache Software Foundation plans to continue to innovate "The Apache Way" with new Open Source projects and communities for years to come. Donations to the ASF help keep Apache software available to everyone.
- "From our first contributions to The Apache Software Foundation in 2006 until today, the ASF has been teaching us and everyone how to do community driven Open Source. We thank the ASF, their communities and all who have been involved! Congratulations on 20 years of volunteer-led service, and the many accomplishments with code and community. We look forward to collaborating on the next 20." –Adrian Cockcroft, VP Cloud Strategy at AWS
- "The Apache Software Foundation and OSI both turned 20 recently. As two of the founding organizations of the Open Source community, they are fundamental to its growth and success. The Apache Way ensures all participants have equal representation and footing, and developers are valued based on their contributions' merits. Bloomberg developers first got involved as Open Source community collaborators and contributors seven years ago, and we've been involved with – and a sponsor of – the ASF almost this entire time, as it’s the home of dozens of projects that are incredibly important to us." –Kevin Fleming, Head of Open Source Community Engagement and Member of the CTO Office at Bloomberg
- "Congratulations to The Apache Software Foundation on 20 years of ground-breaking software development and Open Source community leadership. The ASF has provided value to Cerner for more than 15 years through innovative projects and rich communities. We can count on the ASF to be the source of high-quality, foundational software and to provide a collaborative community that makes it easy for our engineers to grow." –Nathan Beyer, VP & Chief Engineer at Cerner, and ASF Member
- "The Apache Software Foundation provides a fertile home for software communities. The Foundation’s unique approach has created many industry standards and will likely continue to do so for many more years. Apache projects are famous not just for great technology, but for their longevity and vendor-independence. Cloudera looks forward to continuing to collaborate with others at Apache for decades to come." –Doug Cutting, Chief Architect at Cloudera
- "Datadog is a proud sponsor of The Apache Software Foundation. What an amazing journey it's been, from a small group of developers working on httpd to a foundation that stewards some truly amazing Open Source projects. As a consumer and contributor to many of those projects, it's difficult to understate the impact they've had; not only on us but on the software industry as a whole. Congratulations on 20 years!" –Jeremy Garcia, Director of Technical Community and Open Source at Datadog
- "After twenty years of practicing Open Source law, I appreciate how critical The Apache Software Foundation has been to the success of the OSS ecosystem. I am honored to work with the Foundation and its members." –Mark Radcliffe, Partner at DLA Piper
- "We look forward to another 20 years of Open Source software with The Apache Software Foundation! We were excited to be one of the first corporate members in 2005, and even more excited to select the Apache license for Android in 2008. There's very few organizations that have shown the persistent dedication to Open Source the way that the ASF has and we're proud to be a part of it as a sponsor and to have so many of our engineers contributing to Apache projects." –Chris DiBona, Director of Open Source at Google
- "From an auspicious launch with the Apache HTTP Server to over 350 projects today, Apache continues to drive innovation in the industry and IBM is proud to have supported its founding. With dozens new projects coming to the ASF each year, from Artificial Intelligence to Deep Learning, Big Data, Cloud Computing, DevOps, IoT and Edge Computing, Mobile, Servers, and Web Frameworks, The Apache Software Foundation is an anchor for world-changing Open Source projects. We look forward to continued contributions and collaboration for many years to come." –Todd Moore, Vice President of Open Technology and Developer Advocacy at IBM
- "It's an honor and a privilege to help Apache, an organization so deeply ingrained in the history and growth of the Internet, fundraise online. Congratulations on 20 years, and cheers to the next 20!" –Alex Morse, CEO at Hopsie
- "Leaseweb has been using Apache/ASF projects for a multitude of products and services over the last 20 years. The ASF is responsible for a mindboggling amount of Open Source projects that truly make up the fabric of the Internet. For Leaseweb, the ASF is in the core of many of our Cloud and Hosting platforms. Apart from helping out with our Platinum Sponsorship, Leaseweb would like to thank all developers and other volunteers in ASF and ASF projects for continuing to build software that makes the Internet what it is today. We’re looking forward to another 20 years of innovation, code, and community – and proud to be a small part of that." –Robert van der Meulen, Global Product Strategy Lead at Leaseweb
- "Twenty years ago the ASF's vendor neutral model of Open Source software development was central to the commercialization of the World Wide Web and has continued to accelerate innovation across the IT industry since then. At Microsoft we are committed to ensuring that Azure is the best cloud platform for our partners and customers. A key aspect of delivering on this goal is to contribute to the success of Open Source projects. The ASF's emphasis on vendor neutrality, is key to the success of many Open Source components used by both Microsoft and our partners. Happy Birthday to The Apache Software Foundation." –John Gossman, Lead Architect of Microsoft Azure
- "The Apache Software Foundation has provided stewardship for much of the modern Internet, from the Apache Web Server itself to cutting edge infrastructure and data science technologies such as Kafka and Hadoop. No-IP is built on Open Source software. It is important for us to support Open Source projects and the Apache Foundation has made it easy to give back. We look forward to the Foundation's future work and wise guidance and we are proud to be associated with it." –Dan Durrer, CEO and Owner of No-IP
- "PCCC.com joins the world in celebrating 20 years of Open Source Software from The Apache Software Foundation. Happy Birthday!" –Kevin A. McGrail, CEO Emeritus of Peregrine Computer Consultants Corporation
- "More than being Open Source, Apache values transparency and openness with their users, something PureVPN staunchly believes in, advocates, and follows. Supporting Apache gives us the opportunity to align ourselves with an amazing team of people that makes a difference in the lives of individuals on a daily basis." –Uzair Gadit, CEO at PureVPN
- "The Apache Software Foundation has been a great help in pushing the Open Source agenda to a wide range of individuals, communities, and vendors over the years. Their approach to meritocracy and community-driven development has helped to shape some world class Open Source projects which have gone on to help drive some world-class products and businesses. Keep it up and here's to the next 20 years!" –Mark Little, VP Engineering and CTO JBoss Middleware at Red Hat
- "Tencent Cloud is proud to be the first platinum sponsor of The Apache Software Foundation from China. In years of supporting with Open Source communities, we found Apache is one of the best places to drive great innovations for industry of AI, Big Data, Cloud Computing, DevOps, Edge Computing, IoT, etc. We would like to thank ASF for its outstanding contributions to Open Source world, and celebrate its 20th Anniversary of Open Source collaboration. Tencent Cloud will stand together with ASF and looks forward to long term contributions and collaborations." –Huixing Wang, Vice President of Tencent Cloud
- "The Apache Software Foundation is among the brightest beacons in the global Open Source movement. HotWax is proud to recognize the ASF for harnessing transparency and meritocracy to generate some of the highest quality and most widely used code in the world, for decades now! Happy 20th -- we are honored to be a part of the community." –Mike Bates, CEO, HotWax Systems
- "Contributing to The Apache Software Foundation projects continues to be part of our engineering strategy." –Gil Yehuda, Senior Director of Open Source at Verizon Media
== RESOURCES FOR EDITORS ==
- The Apache Way to Sustainable Open Source Success https://s.apache.org/GhnI
- Briefing: The Apache Way https://s.apache.org/TheApacheWay
- Our Founders look back on 20 Years of the ASF! https://s.apache.org/ASF20th-Founders
- 20 Years of Open Source Innovation, The Apache Way https://s.apache.org/CmA3
- Foundation Reports and Statements http://www.apache.org/foundation/reports.html
- Video Promo: The ASF at 20 https://s.apache.org/ASF20
- Video Promo: ApacheCon http://s.apache.org/ApacheCon
- Foundation Highlights 1999-2019 http://www.apache.org/press/highlights.html
- ASF Press Kit (logos, creative assets) https://apache.org/foundation/press/kit/
- Social Media Hashtags: #Apache #ASF20 #TheApacheWay
- Twitter handle @TheASF
About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than 350 leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server —the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's merit-based process known as "The Apache Way," more than 730 individual Members and 7,000 Committers across six continents successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting billions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Anonymous, ARM, Baidu, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Handshake, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, Indeed, Inspur, Leaseweb, Microsoft, ODPi, Pineapple Fund, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Target, Tencent, Union Investment, Workday, and Verizon Media. For more information, visit http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF
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