Linhagem do fabricante
The Apache Software Foundation
The web server that ran the web, built by eight people trading patches by email.
Apache began in February 1995 as a set of patches to a web server nobody was maintaining any more. Within a year it was the most-used server on the internet, and it held that position for most of two decades - the default answer to 'what serves this site' for a whole generation of the web.
The public-domain HTTP daemon written by Rob McCool at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications was the most popular server software on the web in early 1995, and its development had stalled when McCool left NCSA in mid-1994. Webmasters had each written their own fixes and extensions with no common place to put them. Brian Behlendorf - who had been patching the NCSA code so it could handle user registration for HotWired, Wired magazine's site - and Cliff Skolnick set up a mailing list and a shared machine in the Bay Area, with bandwidth donated by HotWired.
By the end of February 1995 eight core contributors had formed the Apache Group: Brian Behlendorf, Roy Fielding, Rob Hartill, David Robinson, Cliff Skolnick, Randy Terbush, Robert Thau and Andrew Wilson. The first public release, 0.6.2, came out in April 1995; version 1.0 followed on 1 December, and within a year Apache had passed NCSA httpd to become the most-used web server on the internet.
The name has two explanations and the project has given both. The original FAQ said the result of combining all those patches was 'a patchy server'. Behlendorf said in 2000 that it was chosen out of respect for the Apache people, then in 2007 said it was the patches after all. The ASF's own position today credits the tribe. Both stories are in the record, which is why both are here.
In June 1999 the Apache Group incorporated as the Apache Software Foundation, a Delaware non-profit, with Behlendorf as its first president - so that the project would outlast any individual volunteer. That structure is why the ASF now hosts hundreds of projects rather than one server.
Roy Fielding, one of the original eight, went on to co-author the HTTP/1.1 specification and to define REST in his doctoral dissertation. The people who wrote the server also wrote much of what the server speaks.
Histórias de fundação
The Apache Group
Not a company and not, at the start, a project - a mailing list for people who each had a fix for the same abandoned server and nowhere to put it. The problem it solved first was organisational rather than technical: the code worked, the patches existed, and there was no route from one to the other.
The Apache Software Foundation
Twenty-one founders, incorporating to hold intellectual property and trademarks. The organisation was built to solve the problem that had created it, which is a tidier piece of engineering than most software.
A linha do tempo
- The maintainer leaves
Rob McCool departs NCSA for Netscape, and the most-used web server on the internet stops being maintained while remaining the most-used web server on the internet.
- The other side joins in
NCSA restarted its own server development in the same months, and two of its team joined the Apache list in March as honorary members so the two projects could exchange fixes. The fork and the original cooperated rather than competed, which is not how this usually goes.
- The foundation
The structure the other three hundred projects were later hung on.
Produtos e soluções emblemáticos
- Apache HTTP ServerThe project everything else is named after, and for twenty years the default answer to what is serving this page.
- The module APIThe extension mechanism, and the reason the server outlived its own design decisions - encryption, scripting languages and URL rewriting all arrived as modules written by people outside the core group.
- The Apache LicenseVersion 1.0 carried an advertising clause requiring acknowledgement in promotional material; version 2.0 dropped it and added an explicit patent grant, which is why it is the default permissive licence for corporate contribution today.
- The Apache Software FoundationNow stewarding three hundred or more projects with several thousand volunteer committers - a legal and governance structure offered to projects that need one, which is a product in every sense that matters.
Inovações-chave
- Shambhala: rewriting the thing that workedRobert Thau's new architecture replaced the patched NCSA core with a modular structure, an extension API and pool-based memory allocation. That is the decision the project's next twenty years rest on: a server whose capabilities could be added by strangers without touching the core. Every module anybody remembers was written by somebody who was not in the original eight.
- Cooperating with the code you forkedWhen the original maintainers came back, both sides shared fixes rather than diverging. Software history is full of forks that hardened into rivalries, and the counterexample is worth recording because it was a choice rather than an accident.
- A foundation as succession planningThe ASF exists so that the departure of any contributor changes nothing structural - the same failure that produced Apache in the first place. Incorporating to make yourself unnecessary is an unusual thing for founders to do, and it is why the organisation now hosts projects that have nothing to do with web servers.
- The permissive licence as an invitationAllowing commercial use without requiring reciprocity brought in the companies that a copyleft licence would have kept out. That is the trade the licence makes, and the argument against it is real: a great deal of Apache-licensed work now runs inside products that contribute nothing back. Both halves of that are true at once.
Principais mercados
For most of two decades, the web itself - and still an enormous installed base, though nginx and the cloud providers' own load balancers now take much of the new deployment. The server's decline is not a collapse but a market that grew around it.
The foundation's own position is different and stronger: it is where a corporate-sponsored project goes to become credibly independent, which is a service with almost no competitors.
Posição nos relatórios de analistas
- There is no vendor here to assess, which is the point of the arrangement. What can be measured is durability: a codebase that began as patches to abandoned software is still in production thirty years later, and the organisation built around it now stewards several hundred other projects.
- The lasting contribution is arguably not the server at all. Several of the original eight went on to write the specifications the web runs on, and the governance model the foundation invented has been copied by nearly every large open-source project since - including by companies that would never have released anything without a neutral structure to release it into.