The Apache HTTP Server Project

http://httpd.apache.org/

The Apache HTTP Server Project is a collaborative software development effortaimed at creating a robust, commercial-grade, featureful, and freely-availablesource code implementaation of an HTTP (Web) server. The project is jointly managed by a group of volunteers located around the world, using the Internetand the Web to communicate, plan, and develop the server and its related documentation. 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 (as it was called in the early days), recognize the many contributors, and explainhow you can join the fun too.

In February of 1995, the most populare server software on the Web was thepublic domain HTTP daemon developed by Rob McCool at the National Centerfor Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.However, development of that httpd had stalled after Rob left NCSA inmid-1994, and many webmasters had developed their own extensions and bugfixes that were in need of a common distribution. A small group of thesewebmasters, contacted via private e-mail, gathered togetgher for the purposeof coordinating their changes (in the form of "patches"). Brian Behlendorfand 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 foundationof 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 fixesand worthwhile enhancements we could find, tested the result on our ownservers, and made the first official public release (0.6.2) of the Apacheserver in April 1995. By coincidence, NCSA restarted their own developmentduring the same period, and Brandon Long and Beth Frank of the NCSA ServerDevelopment Team joined the list in March as honorary members so that thetwo projects could share ideas and fixes.

The early Apache server was a big hit, but we all knew that the codebaseneeded a general overhaul and redesign. During May-June 1995, whileRob Hartill and the rest of the group focused on implementing new featuresfor 0.7.x (like pre-forked child processes) and supporting the rapidly growingApache user community, Robert Thau designed a new server architecture(code-named Shambhala) which included a modular structure and API for betterextensibility, pool-based memory allocation, and an adaptive pre-forkingprocess model. The group switched to this new server base in July and addedthe 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 setof documentation (by David Robinson), and the addition of many features

in the form of our standard modules, Apache 1.0 was released onDecember 1, 1995.

Less than a year after the group was formed, the Apache server passedNCSA's httpd as the #1 server on the Internet.

The survey by Netcraft (http://www.netcraft.com/survey/) shows that Apacheis today more widely used than all other web servers combined.

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The current project management committe of the Apache HTTP Serverproject (as of March, 2011) is:

Aaron Bannert Andr Malo Astrid Stolper Ben Laurie Bojan Smojver Brad Nicholes Brian Havard Brian McCallister Chris Darroch Chuck Murcko Colm MacCrthaigh Dan Poirier Dirk-Willem van Gulik Doug MacEachern Eric Covener Erik Abele Graham Dumpleton Graham Leggett Greg Ames Greg Stein Gregory Trubetskoy Guenter Knauf Issac Goldstand Jeff Trawick Jim Gallacher Jim Jagielski Joe Orton Joe Schaefer Joshua Slive Justin Erenkrantz Ken Coar Lars Eilebrecht Manoj Kasichainula Marc Slemko Mark J. Cox Martin Kraemer Maxime Petazzoni Nick Kew Nicolas Lehuen Noirin Shirley Paul Querna Philip M. Gollucci Ralf S. Engelschall Randy Kobes Rasmus Lerdorf Rich Bowen Roy T. Fielding Rdiger Plm Sander Striker Sander Temm Stefan Fritsch Tony Stevenson Victor J. Orlikowski Wilfredo Sanchez William A. Rowe Jr. Yoshiki Hayashi

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 alsofreely-available and linked from the related projects page:, and their authors frequentlycontribute ideas, patches, and testing.

Hundreds of people have made individual contributions to the Apacheproject. Patch contributors are listed in the CHANGES file.

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How to become involved in the Apache project

There are several levels of contributing. If you just want to sendin an occasional suggestion/fix, then you can just use the bug reportingform at . You can also subscribe

to the announcements mailing list (announce-subscribe@httpd.apache.org) whichwe use to broadcast information about new releases, bugfixes, and upcomingevents. There's a lot of information about the development process (much ofit in serious need of updating) to be found at .

If you'd like to become an active contributor to the Apache project (thegroup of volunteers who vote on changes to the distributed server), thenyou 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 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 timeto time when core members nominate outstanding contributors and therest of the core members agree. The core group focus is more on"business" issues and limited-circulation things like security problemsthan 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 moreyou are allowed to do. The group founders set the original rules, butthey can be changed by vote of the active members. There is a groupof people who have logins on our server (apache.org) and access to thesvn repository. Everyone has access to the svn snapshots. Changes tothe code are proposed on the mailing list and usually voted on by activemembers -- three +1 (yes votes) and no -1 (no votes, or vetoes) are neededto commit a code change during a release cycle; docs are usually committedfirst and then changed as needed, with conflicts resolved by majority vote.

Our primary method of communication is our mailing list. Approximately 40messages a day flow over the list, and are typically very conversational intone. We discuss new features to add, bug fixes, user problems, developmentsin the web server community, release dates, etc. The actual code developmenttakes place on the developers' local machines, with proposed changescommunicated using a patch (output of a unified "diff -u oldfile newfile"command), and committed to the source repository by one of the coredevelopers using remote svn. Anyone on the mailing list can vote on aparticular issue, but we only count those made by active members or peoplewho are known to be experts on that part of the server. Vetoes must beaccompanied by a convincing explanation.

New members of the Apache Group are added when a frequent contributor isnominated by one member and unanimously approved by the voting members.In most cases, this "new" member has been actively contributing to thegroup'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 groupchanges and our development/coordination tools improve.

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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 beenincorporated as a membership-based, not-for-profit corporation in orderto ensure that the Apache projects continue to exist beyond the participationof individual volunteers, to enable contributions of intellectual propertyand funds on a sound basis, and to provide a vehicle for limiting legalexposure while participating in open-source software projects.

You are invited to participate in The Apache Software Foundation. We welcomecontributions in many forms. Our membership consists of those individualswho have demonstrated a commitment to collaborative open-source softwaredevelopment through sustained participation and contributions within theFoundation's projects. Many people and companies have contributed towardsthe success of the Apache projects.

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Why The Apache HTTP Server Is Free

Apache HTTP Server exists to provide a robust and commercial-grade referenceimplementation of the HTTP protocol. It must remain a platform upon whichindividuals and institutions can build reliable systems, both forexperimental purposes and for mission-critical purposes. We believe thetools of online publishing should be in the hands of everyone, andsoftware companies should make their money providing value-added servicessuch as specialized modules and support, amongst other things. We realizethat it is often seen as an economic advantage for one company to "own" amarket - in the software industry that means to control tightly aparticular conduit such that all others must pay. This is typically doneby "owning" the protocols through which companies conduct business, at theexpense of all those other companies. To the extent that the protocols ofthe World Wide Web remain "unowned" by a single company, the Web willremain a level playing field for companies large and small. Thus,"ownership" of the protocol must be prevented, and the existence of arobust reference implementation of the protocol, available absolutely forfree to all companies, is a tremendously good thing.

Furthermore, Apache httpd is an organic entity; those who benefit from itby using it often contribute back to it by providing feature enhancements,bug fixes, and support for others in public newsgroups. The amount ofeffort expended by any particular individual is usually fairly light, butthe resulting product is made very strong. This kind of community canonly happen with freeware -- when someone pays for software, they usuallyaren't willing to fix its bugs. One can argue, then, that Apache'sstrength comes from the fact that it's free, and if it were made "notfree" it would suffer tremendously, even if that money were spent on areal development team.

We want to see Apache httpd used very widely -- by large companies, smallcompanies, research institutions, schools, individuals, in the intranetenvironment, everywhere -- even though this may mean that companies whocould afford commercial software, and would pay for it without blinking,might get a "free ride" by using Apache httpd. We would even be happy if some commercial software companies completely dropped their own HTTP serverdevelopment plans and used Apache httpd as a base, with the proper attributions

as described in the LICENSE file.

Thanks for using Apache HTTP Server!