Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition

Who Wrote Apache, and Why?

Apache gets its name from the fact that it consists of some existing code plus some patches. The FAQ^[1] thinks that this is cute; others may think it’s the sort of joke that gets programmers a bad name. A more responsible group thinks that Apache is an appropriate title because of the resourcefulness and adaptability of the American Indian tribe.

You have to understand that Apache is free to its users and is written by a team of volunteers who do not get paid for their work. Whether they decide to incorporate your or anyone else’s ideas is entirely up to them. If you don’t like what they do, feel free to collect a team and write your own web server or to adapt the existing Apache code — as many have.

The first web server was built by the British physicist Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research at Geneva, Switzerland. The immediate ancestor of Apache was built by the U.S. government’s NCSA, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Because this code was written with (American) taxpayers’ money, it is available to all; you can, if you like, download the source code in C from http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu, paying due attention to the license conditions.

There were those who thought that things could be done better, and in the FAQ for Apache (at http://www.apache.org ), we read:

...Apache was originally based on code and ideas found in the most popular HTTP server of the time, NCSA httpd 1.3 (early 1995).

That phrase “of ...