“Apache has become the Net’s favorite server software. Meet
the eight men who started it all.“
“February 1995. The Web was just beginning to gain mainstream
attention, and most Web servers ran the public domain HTTP daemon
developed by Rob McCool at the University of Illinois’ National
Center for Supercomputing Applications. Problem was, McCool had
left NCSA in ’94 and development of the server software had halted.
So a group of eight webmasters banded together to share extensions
and bug fixes and coordinate patches. (Apache owes its name to “a
patch.”) These eight core contributors, Randy Terbush, Brian
Behlendorf, Roy Fielding, Rob Hartill, David Robinson, Cliff
Skolnick, Robert Thau, and Andrew Wilson, founded the Apache Group.
Under the Apache license, they enlisted the help of hackers
worldwide. (The Apache license allows developers to modify code and
sell the new program without having to distribute modifications in
the source code.) Now, according to a Netcraft survey, Apache holds
55 percent of the Web server market, more than all the other
competing servers combined. Here are the original developers’
stories:…”