‘A last stand against the commercialization of the Web.’
IDEA No 30
APACHE WEB SERVER
Apache is the most popular web server software in the world, delivering around two-thirds of all websites. Incredibly, thanks to a 21-year-old university drop-out from California, it is free, hacked together by a loose coalition of volunteer programmers.
Brian Behlendorf, open-source hero and creator of the Apache web server.
In 1993, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina created the world’s first graphical browser, Mosaic. This changed everything. Suddenly, the Web was no longer the exclusive domain of academics and computer geeks (see Web Browser).
Developed at the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications, alongside the Mosaic browser, was the NCSA web server. Programmed by undergraduate Rob McCool, it quickly became the server of choice for those launching the first wave of commercial websites. One of these young webmasters, setting up Wired magazine’s first website, Hotwired, was 21-year-old university drop-out Brian Behlendorf.
The NCSA web server was not perfect – its password authentication module did not quite meet Wired’s requirements. So, like many webmasters at the time, Behlendorf rolled up his sleeves and wrote a patch that fixed the problem. Previously, he would have sent the patch to McCool for inclusion in the next release of the program, but McCool and the original Mosaic team at NCSA had departed en masse to Silicon Valley, many of them lured by Marc Andreessen to Netscape.
Behlendorf could see the Web going the same way as the desktop, monopolized by a single company, and was determined to do what he could to ensure that a robust, feature-rich web server remained publicly available. He knew other webmasters were writing their own NCSA fixes, so he contacted a few, suggesting that they join forces to collect all the updates in one place and overhaul the NCSA code themselves.
Seven programmers answered Behlendorf’s call, and by April 1995 they had completely rewritten the program. Because they represented a laststandagainstthecommercialization of the web, the team became the Apache Group. It was also a convenient pun, their rewritten code being ‘a patchy server’. Less than a year later, in December 1995, Apache surpassed the NCSA server as the most popular on the internet – a position it retains today.
Now run as a not-for-profit corporation, the Apache Software Foundation still adheres to its original principles, the ideals of the gift economy practised by Behlendorf and his fellow open-source pioneers.
As for Behlendorf himself, he is now CTO at the World Economic Forum, showing business and political leaders how they can improve the world through the participatory, gifting culture of the open-source movement that gave birth to the Apache web server.■
‘The server of choice for the first wave of commercial websites.’
A switching panel in a data centre.