The Apache HTTP Server Project

http://httpd.apache.org/

February 2002

The Apache Project is a collaborative software development effort aimed

at creating a robust, commercial-grade, featureful, and freely-available

source code implementation of an HTTP (Web) server. The project is

jointly managed by a group of volunteers located around the world, using

the Internet and the Web to communicate, plan, and develop the server and

its related documentation. These volunteers are known as the Apache Group.

In addition, hundreds of users have contributed ideas, code, and

documentation to the project. This file is intended to briefly describe

the history of the Apache Group, recognize the many contributors, and

explain how you can join the fun too.

In February of 1995, the most popular server software on the Web was the

public domain HTTP daemon developed by Rob McCool at the National Center

for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

However, development of that httpd had stalled after Rob left NCSA in

mid-1994, and many webmasters had developed their own extensions and bug

fixes that were in need of a common distribution. A small group of these

webmasters, contacted via private e-mail, gathered together for the purpose

of coordinating their changes (in the form of "patches"). Brian Behlendorf

and Cliff Skolnick put together a mailing list, shared information space,

and logins for the core developers on a machine in the California Bay Area,

with bandwidth and diskspace donated by HotWired and Organic Online.

By the end of February, eight core contributors formed the foundation

of the original Apache Group:

Brian Behlendorf Roy T. Fielding Rob Hartill

David Robinson Cliff Skolnick Randy Terbush

Robert S. Thau Andrew Wilson

with additional contributions from

Eric Hagberg Frank Peters Nicolas Pioch

Using NCSA httpd 1.3 as a base, we added all of the published bug fixes

and worthwhile enhancements we could find, tested the result on our own

servers, and made the first official public release (0.6.2) of the Apache

server in April 1995. By coincidence, NCSA restarted their own development

during the same period, and Brandon Long and Beth Frank of the NCSA Server

Development Team joined the list in March as honorary members so that the

two projects could share ideas and fixes.

The early Apache server was a big hit, but we all knew that the codebase

needed a general overhaul and redesign. During May-June 1995, while

Rob Hartill and the rest of the group focused on implementing new features

for 0.7.x (like pre-forked child processes) and supporting the rapidly growing

Apache user community, Robert Thau designed a new server architecture

(code-named Shambhala) which included a modular structure and API for better

extensibility, pool-based memory allocation, and an adaptive pre-forking

process model. The group switched to this new server base in July and added

the features from 0.7.x, resulting in Apache 0.8.8 (and its brethren)

in August.

After extensive beta testing, many ports to obscure platforms, a new set

of documentation (by David Robinson), and the addition of many features

in the form of our standard modules, Apache 1.0 was released on

December 1, 1995.

Less than a year after the group was formed, the Apache server passed

NCSA's httpd as the #1 server on the Internet.

The survey by Netcraft (http://www.netcraft.com/survey/) shows that Apache

is today more widely used than all other web servers combined.

============================================================================

Current Apache Group in alphabetical order as of 2 April 2002:

Greg Ames IBM Corporation, Research Triangle Park, NC, USA

Aaron Bannert California

Brian Behlendorf Collab.Net, California

Ryan Bloom California

Ken Coar IBM Corporation, Research Triangle Park, NC, USA

Mark J. Cox Red Hat, UK

Lars Eilebrecht Freelance Consultant, Munich, Germany

Ralf S. Engelschall Cable & Wireless Deutschland, Munich, Germany

Justin Erenkrantz University of California, Irvine

Roy T. Fielding Day Software, California

Tony Finch Covalent Technologies, California

Dean Gaudet Transmeta Corporation, California

Dirk-Willem van Gulik Covalent Technologies, California

Brian Havard Australia

Ian Holsman CNET, California

Ben Hyde Gensym, Massachusetts

Jim Jagielski jaguNET Access Services, Maryland

Manoj Kasichainula Collab.Net, California

Alexei Kosut Stanford University, California

Martin Kraemer Munich, Germany

Ben Laurie Freelance Consultant, UK

Rasmus Lerdorf Linuxcare, California

Daniel Lopez Ridruejo Covalent Technologies, California

Doug MacEachern Covalent Technologies, California

Aram W. Mirzadeh CableVision, New York

Chuck Murcko The Topsail Group, Pennsylvania

Brian Pane CNET Networks, California

Sameer Parekh California

David Reid UK

William A. Rowe, Jr. Covalent, Illinois

Wilfredo Sanchez Apple Computer, California

Cliff Skolnick California

Marc Slemko Canada

Joshua Slive Canada

Greg Stein California

Bill Stoddard IBM Corporation, Research Triangle Park, NC

Sander Striker The Netherlands

Paul Sutton Seattle

Randy Terbush Covalent Technologies, California

Jeff Trawick IBM Corporation, Research Triangle Park, NC

Cliff Woolley University of Virginia

Apache Emeritus (old group members now off doing other things)

Rob Hartill Internet Movie DB, UK

David Robinson Cambridge University, UK

Robert S. Thau MIT, Massachusetts

Andrew Wilson Freelance Consultant, UK

Other major contributors

Howard Fear (mod_include), Florent Guillaume (language negotiation),

Koen Holtman (rewrite of mod_negotiation),

Kevin Hughes (creator of all those nifty icons),

Brandon Long and Beth Frank (NCSA Server Development Team, post-1.3),

Ambarish Malpani (Beginning of the NT port),

Rob McCool (original author of the NCSA httpd 1.3),

Paul Richards (convinced the group to use remote CVS after 1.0),

Garey Smiley (OS/2 port), Henry Spencer (author of the regex library).

Many 3rd-party modules, frequently used and recommended, are also

freely-available and linked from the related projects page:

<http://modules.apache.org/>, and their authors frequently

contribute ideas, patches, and testing.

Hundreds of people have made individual contributions to the Apache

project. Patch contributors are listed in the CHANGES file.

Frequent contributors have included Petr Lampa, Tom Tromey, James H.

Cloos Jr., Ed Korthof, Nathan Neulinger, Jason S. Clary, Jason A. Dour,

Michael Douglass, Tony Sanders, Brian Tao, Michael Smith, Adam Sussman,

Nathan Schrenk, Matthew Gray, and John Heidemann.

============================================================================

How to become involved in the Apache project

There are several levels of contributing. If you just want to send

in an occasional suggestion/fix, then you can just use the bug reporting

form at <http://httpd.apache.org/bug_report.html>. You can also subscribe

to the announcements mailing list (announce-subscribe@httpd.apache.org) which

we use to broadcast information about new releases, bugfixes, and upcoming

events. There's a lot of information about the development process (much of

it in serious need of updating) to be found at <http://httpd.apache.org/dev/>.

If you'd like to become an active contributor to the Apache project (the

group of volunteers who vote on changes to the distributed server), then

you need to start by subscribing to the dev@httpd.apache.org mailing list.

One warning though: traffic is high, 1000 to 1500 messages/month.

To subscribe to the list, send an email to dev-subscribe@httpd.apache.org.

We recommend reading the list for a while before trying to jump in to

development.

NOTE: The developer mailing list (dev@httpd.apache.org) is not

a user support forum; it is for people actively working on development

of the server code and documentation, and for planning future

directions. If you have user/configuration questions, send them

to users list <http://httpd.apache.org/userslist> or to the USENET

newsgroup "comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix".or for windows users,

the newsgroup "comp.infosystems.www.servers.ms-windows".

There is a core group of contributors (informally called the "core")

which was formed from the project founders and is augmented from time

to time when core members nominate outstanding contributors and the

rest of the core members agree. The core group focus is more on

"business" issues and limited-circulation things like security problems

than on mainstream code development. The term "The Apache Group"

technically refers to this core of project contributors.

The Apache project is a meritocracy -- the more work you have done, the more

you are allowed to do. The group founders set the original rules, but

they can be changed by vote of the active members. There is a group

of people who have logins on our server (apache.org) and access to the

CVS repository. Everyone has access to the CVS snapshots. Changes to

the code are proposed on the mailing list and usually voted on by active

members -- three +1 (yes votes) and no -1 (no votes, or vetoes) are needed

to commit a code change during a release cycle; docs are usually committed

first and then changed as needed, with conflicts resolved by majority vote.

Our primary method of communication is our mailing list. Approximately 40

messages a day flow over the list, and are typically very conversational in

tone. We discuss new features to add, bug fixes, user problems, developments

in the web server community, release dates, etc. The actual code development

takes place on the developers' local machines, with proposed changes

communicated using a patch (output of a unified "diff -u oldfile newfile"

command), and committed to the source repository by one of the core

developers using remote CVS. Anyone on the mailing list can vote on a

particular issue, but we only count those made by active members or people

who are known to be experts on that part of the server. Vetoes must be

accompanied by a convincing explanation.

New members of the Apache Group are added when a frequent contributor is

nominated by one member and unanimously approved by the voting members.

In most cases, this "new" member has been actively contributing to the

group's work for over six months, so it's usually an easy decision.

The above describes our past and current (as of July 2000) guidelines,

which will probably change over time as the membership of the group

changes and our development/coordination tools improve.

============================================================================

The Apache Software Foundation (www.apache.org)

The Apache Software Foundation exists to provide organizational, legal,

and financial support for the Apache open-source software projects.

Founded in June 1999 by the Apache Group, the Foundation has been

incorporated as a membership-based, not-for-profit corporation in order

to ensure that the Apache projects continue to exist beyond the participation

of individual volunteers, to enable contributions of intellectual property

and funds on a sound basis, and to provide a vehicle for limiting legal

exposure while participating in open-source software projects.

You are invited to participate in The Apache Software Foundation. We welcome

contributions in many forms. Our membership consists of those individuals

who have demonstrated a commitment to collaborative open-source software

development through sustained participation and contributions within the

Foundation's projects. Many people and companies have contributed towards

the success of the Apache projects.

============================================================================

Why Apache Is Free

Apache exists to provide a robust and commercial-grade reference

implementation of the HTTP protocol. It must remain a platform upon which

individuals and institutions can build reliable systems, both for

experimental purposes and for mission-critical purposes. We believe the

tools of online publishing should be in the hands of everyone, and

software companies should make their money providing value-added services

such as specialized modules and support, amongst other things. We realize

that it is often seen as an economic advantage for one company to "own" a

market - in the software industry that means to control tightly a

particular conduit such that all others must pay. This is typically done

by "owning" the protocols through which companies conduct business, at the

expense of all those other companies. To the extent that the protocols of

the World Wide Web remain "unowned" by a single company, the Web will

remain a level playing field for companies large and small. Thus,

"ownership" of the protocol must be prevented, and the existence of a

robust reference implementation of the protocol, available absolutely for

free to all companies, is a tremendously good thing.

Furthermore, Apache is an organic entity; those who benefit from it

by using it often contribute back to it by providing feature enhancements,

bug fixes, and support for others in public newsgroups. The amount of

effort expended by any particular individual is usually fairly light, but

the resulting product is made very strong. This kind of community can

only happen with freeware -- when someone pays for software, they usually

aren't willing to fix its bugs. One can argue, then, that Apache's

strength comes from the fact that it's free, and if it were made "not

free" it would suffer tremendously, even if that money were spent on a

real development team.

We want to see Apache used very widely -- by large companies, small

companies, research institutions, schools, individuals, in the intranet

environment, everywhere -- even though this may mean that companies who

could afford commercial software, and would pay for it without blinking,

might get a "free ride" by using Apache. We would even be happy if some

commercial software companies completely dropped their own HTTP server

development plans and used Apache as a base, with the proper attributions

as described in the LICENSE file.

Thanks for using Apache!