A short history of the Apache Group (outdated) and the ASF.

git-svn-id: https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/httpd/httpd/trunk@87175 13f79535-47bb-0310-9956-ffa450edef68

1 files changed, 266 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/ABOUT_APACHE b/ABOUT_APACHE
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..696a87bd54
--- /dev/null
+++ b/ABOUT_APACHE
@@ -0,0 +1,266 @@
+
+                     The Apache HTTP Server Project
+
+                       http://www.apache.org/httpd
+
+                               July 2000
+
+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 27 July 2000:
+
+   Brian Behlendorf       Collab.Net, California 
+   Ryan Bloom             Covalent Technologies, California 
+   Ken Coar               IBM Corporation, Research Triangle Park, NC, USA
+   Mark J. Cox            Red Hat, England
+   Lars Eilebrecht        CyberSolutions, Munich, Germany 
+   Ralf S. Engelschall    Munich, Germany.
+   Roy T. Fielding        eBuilt, California 
+   Tony Finch             Covalent Technologies, California
+   Dean Gaudet            Transmeta Corporation, California 
+   Dirk-Willem van Gulik  Covalent Technologies, California 
+   Brian Havard           Australia
+   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 
+   Sameer Parekh          California 
+   David Reid             UK
+   William A. Rowe, Jr.   Freelance Consultant, Chicago area
+   Wilfredo Sanchez       Apple Computer, California
+   Cliff Skolnick         California
+   Marc Slemko            Canada 
+   Greg Stein             California
+   Bill Stoddard          IBM Corporation, Research Triangle Park, NC
+   Paul Sutton            Seattle
+   Randy Terbush          Covalent Technologies, California 
+
+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 src/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://www.apache.org/bug_report.html>.  You can also subscribe
+to the announcements mailing list (apache-announce@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://dev.apache.org/>.
+
+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 new-httpd@apache.org mailing list.
+One warning though: traffic is high, 1000 to 1500 messages/month.
+To subscribe to the list, send "subscribe new-httpd" in the body of
+a message to <majordomo@apache.org>.  We recommend reading the list for
+a while before trying to jump in to development.
+
+   NOTE: The developer mailing list (new-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 the USENET newsgroup "comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix".
+
+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!
+