2007: A great year for Apache

Call it the year of Apache, if you will. The Apache Software Foundation ("Apache") has announced strong results for 2007, which is even more significant when one considers how strong Apache was already.

Here are a few of the more salient and impressive results:

• Starting from a base of 21 members (with the right to commit code to Apache's various projects) at Apache's inception in June of 1999, Apache grew 56 members in 2007 to a total of 259 members (and over 1,500 committers and a much larger number of non-affiliated contributors).


• Apache added Yahoo! as a corporate sponsor, adding to a roster of sponsors that includes Google and Yahoo! (Platinum), HP (Gold), Covalent (Silver), and AirPlus International, Tetsuya Kitahata, and Two Sigma Investments (Bronze).


• The ASF has contributed millions of lines of code to the open-source code base with nearly 500 community-driven modules developed to extend functionality of the Apache HTTP Server alone.


• Apache started with just two Projects (Apache HTTP Server and the ApacheCon Conference Planning committee), but now comprises more than 55 Top-Level Projects (TLPs) and two-dozen initiatives under incubation.


• As for the original project (Apache HTTP server), it has more than 74% market share according to a January 2008 web server survey by Security Space, powering more than 75 million websites across the Internet (according to a December 2007 Netcraft survey).

A banner year for Apache, and well-deserved. Apache has always been a responsible member of the open-source community, producing excellent code (usually) and a positive example of how to develop open-source software.