World’s largest Open Source foundation advances community-led innovation "The Apache Way"


Wakefield, MA —26 March 2020— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today its 21st Anniversary.


Advancing its mission of providing software for the public good, the ASF's all-volunteer community grew from 21 original Members overseeing the development of the Apache HTTP Server to 765 individual Members, 206 Apache Project Management Committees, and 7,600+ Committers shepherding 300 projects and 200M+ lines of Apache code valued at more than $20B.


Apache’s breakthrough technology touches every aspect of modern computing, powering most of the Internet, managing exabytes of data, executing teraflops of operations, and storing trillions of objects in virtually every industry. Apache projects are all freely-available, at 100% no cost, and with no licensing fees.


“Over the past two decades, The Apache Software Foundation has served as a trusted home for vendor-neutral, community-led collaboration,“ said David Nalley, Executive Vice President at The Apache Software Foundation. “Today, the ASF is a vanguard for Open Source, fostering project communities large and small, with a portfolio of best-in-class innovations upon which the world continues to rely.“

The Apache Way

As a community-led organization, the ASF is strictly vendor-neutral. Its independence ensures that no organization, including ASF Sponsors and those who employ contributors to Apache projects, is able to control a project's direction or has special privileges of any kind.

The ASF’s community-focused development process known as "The Apache Way" guides existing projects and their communities, and continues to inspire a new generation of innovations from around the world. The Apache Way edict involves:

  • Earned Authority: all individuals are given the opportunity to participate based on publicly earned merit, i.e., what they contribute to the community.

  • Community of Peers: individuals participate at the ASF, with merit gained by the individual everlasting and free from association of employment status or employer.

  • Open Communications: all communications related to code and decision-making are publicly accessible to ensure asynchronous collaboration within the ASF’s globally-distributed communities.

  • Consensus Decision Making: Apache Projects are overseen by a self-selected team of active volunteers who are contributing to their respective projects.

  • Responsible Oversight: The ASF governance model is based on trust and delegated oversight. 


The Apache Way has been a forerunner in collaborative computing, and has directly influenced the InnerSource methodology of applying Open Source and open development principles to an organization. The Apache Way has been adopted by countless organizations, including Capital One, Comcast, Ericsson, HP, IBM, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, SAP, T-Mobile, and many others.

The ASF’s focus on community is so integral to the Apache ethos that the maxim, "Community Over Code" is an unwavering tenet. Vibrant, diverse communities keep code alive, however, code, no matter how well written, cannot thrive without a community behind it. Members of the Apache community share their thoughts on “Why Apache” in the teaser for “Trillions and Trillions Served”, the upcoming documentary on the ASF https://s.apache.org/Trillions-teaser 

Powerhouse Projects

Dozens of enterprise-grade Apache projects have defined industries and serve as the backbone for some of the 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. 

 

No other software foundation serves the industry with such a wide range of projects. Examples of the breadth of applications that are "Powered by Apache" include:

 

  • China’s second largest courier, SF Express, uses Apache SkyWalking to ship critical COVID-19 coronavirus supplies worldwide;

  • Apache Guacamole’s clientless remote desktop gateway is helping thousands of individuals, businesses, and universities worldwide safely work from home without needing to be tied to a specific device, VPN, or client;

  • Alibaba uses Apache Flink to process more than 2.5 billion records per second for its merchandise dashboard and real-time customer recommendations;

  • the European Space Agency’s Jupiter spacecraft mission control is powered by Apache Karaf, Apache Maven, and Apache Groovy;

  • British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)’s application Gaffer stores and manages petabytes of data using Apache Accumulo, Apache HBase, and Apache Parquet;

  • Netflix uses Apache Druid to manage its 1.5 trillion-row data warehouse to manage what users see when tapping the Netflix icon or logging in from a browser across platforms;

  • Uber's 100-petabyte data lake is powered in near real-time using Apache Hudi (incubating), supporting everything from warehousing to advanced machine learning;

  • Boston Children's Hospital uses Apache cTAKES to link phenotypic and genomic data in electronic health records for the Precision Link Biobank for Health Discovery;

  • Amazon, DataStax, IBM, Microsoft, Neo4j, NBC Universal and many others use Apache Tinkerpop in their graph databases and to write complicated traversals; 

  • the Global Biodiversity Information Facility uses Apache Beam, Hadoop, HBase, Lucene, Spark, and others to integrate biodiversity data from nearly 1,600 institutions and more than a million species and nearly 1.4 billion location records freely available for research;

  • the European Commission developed its new API Gateway infrastructure using Apache Camel;

  • China Telecom Bestpay uses Apache ShardingSphere (incubating) to scale 10 billion datasets for mobile payments distributed across more than 30 applications;

  • Apple’s Siri uses Apache HBase to complete full ring replication around the world in 10 seconds;

  • the US Navy uses Apache Rya to power smart drones, autonomous small robot swarms, manned-unmanned team advanced tactical communications, and more; and

  • hundreds of millions of Websites worldwide are powered by the Apache HTTP Server.

Additional Milestones

In addition to the ASF’s 21st Anniversary, the greater Apache community are celebrating milestone anniversaries of the following projects:

25 Years - Apache HTTP Server

21 Years - Apache OpenOffice (at the ASF since 2011), Xalan, Xerces

20 Years - Apache Jakarta (Apache Open Source Java projects), James, mod_perl, Tcl, APR/Portable Runtime, Struts, Subversion (at the ASF since 2009), Tomcat

19 Years - Apache Avalon, Commons, log4j, Lucene, Torque, Turbine, Velocity

18 Years - Apache Ant, DB, FOP, Incubator, POI, Tapestry

17 Years - Apache Cocoon, James, Logging Services, Mavin, Web Services

16 Years - Apache Gump, Portals, Struts, Geronimo, SpamAssassin, Xalan, XML Graphics

15 Years - Apache Lucene, Directory, MyFaces, Xerces, Tomcat


The chronology of all Apache projects can be found at https://projects.apache.org/committees.html?date


The Apache Incubator is home to 45 projects undergoing development, spanning AI, Big Data, blockchain, Cloud computing, cryptography, deep learning, hardware, IoT, machine learning, microservices, mobile, operating systems, testing, visualization, and many other categories. The complete list of projects in the Incubator is available at http://incubator.apache.org/  

Support Apache 

The ASF advances the future of open development by providing Apache projects and their communities bandwidth, connectivity, servers, hardware, development environments, legal counsel, accounting services, trademark protection, marketing and publicity, educational events, and related administrative support.


As a United States private 501(c)(3) not-for-profit charitable organization, the ASF is sustained through tax-deductible corporate and individual contributions that offset day-to-day operating expenses. To support Apache, visit http://apache.org/foundation/contributing.html 

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is the world’s largest Open Source foundation, stewarding 200M+ lines of code and providing more than $20B+ worth of software to the public at 100% no cost. The ASF’s all-volunteer community grew from 21 original founders overseeing the Apache HTTP Server to 765 individual Members and 206 Project Management Committees who successfully lead 350+ Apache projects and initiatives in collaboration with 7,600 Committers through the ASF’s meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way". Apache software is integral to nearly every end user computing device, from laptops to tablets to mobile devices across enterprises and mission-critical applications. Apache projects power most of the Internet, manage exabytes of data, execute teraflops of operations, and store billions of objects in virtually every industry. The commercially-friendly and permissive Apache License v2 is an Open Source industry standard, helping launch billion dollar corporations and benefiting countless users worldwide. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) not-for-profit charitable organization funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Amazon Web Services, Anonymous, ARM, Baidu, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, CarGurus, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Handshake, Huawei, IBM, Indeed, Inspur, Leaseweb, Microsoft, ODPi, Pineapple Fund, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Target, Tencent, Union Investment, Verizon Media, and Workday. For more information, visit http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF


© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Accumulo", "Apache Accumulo", "Camel", "Apache Camel", "cTAKES", "Apache cTAKES", "Druid", "Apache Druid", "Flink", "Apache Flink", "Groovy", "Apache Groovy", "Guacamole", "Apache Guacamole", "HBase", "Apache HBase", "Apache HTTP Server", "Karaf", "Apache Karaf", "Maven", "Apache Maven", "Parquet", "Apache Parquet", "Rya", "Apache Rya", "SkyWalking, "Apache SkyWalking", "Tinkerpop", "Apache Tinkerpop", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.


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