It Took A Village

"Perhaps the importance that we must attach to the achievement of an artist or a group of artists may properly be measured by the answer to the following question: Have they so wrought that it will be impossible henceforth, for those who follow, ever again to act as if they had not existed?" - Walter Sickert, 1910

We all encounter “Not Found” or “Internal Service Error” pages as we surf the web.  These errors come up when a website is down or when a URL no longer exists.  We usually exit the page, start another search, and continue to browse. But if we take a closer look at the bottom, an error page, “Apache”, is almost always there. What is Apache? (And no, we’re not talking about Native Americans.)

For years, I’ve sporadically seen the word “Apache” online and have assumed that Apache had some sort of Internet monopoly.  I have since learned that Apache is a software server for the web.  My intuition was on the right track, since Apache is the most popular HTTP server on the Internet.  But, unlike most monopolies, Apache does not make money. Apache was the first software to truly compete with Netscape’s web server. Apache has changed the way computer programmers, network managers, and website creators compute. However, its significance goes far beyond computer geeks. Apache is the quintessential example of successful open-source collaboration.

Like many technological innovations, Apache started with a few people that trusted each other.  The difference between Apache’s developers and other technology innovators is that the Apache creators did not program in a garage with each other. The Apache developers did not even know one another-- Apache programmers coded online.  As of right now, the Apache Software Foundation has contributors from all over North America, South, America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. It started as a handful of people contributing to the code and turned into a community of thousands of programmers collaborating online.  When someone saw a bug, they fixed it.  When someone had an idea, they coded it and when the community liked it, it stayed. The amazing thing is no one assigned tasks and no one had a schedule. These passionate programmers volunteered to build a web server that is the foundation of the vast majority of every single website on the Internet today.  How is it that they built a better web server than “professional” corporate programmers?  IBM stopped competing with Apache and even used it!   

The story of Apache is special.  It is the first real and widely used creation that came from an online community.  If you look at all of the open-source creations that we have today: Wikipedia, OpenOffice, Firefox, Audacity, Linux, VLC, MySQL,  BitTorrent… the list goes on. Apache paved the path for its successors.  Apache gave inspiration to the free software movement where no one person takes credit. Strangers across the planet worked together towards a common goal. Of course there was and still is other free software and examples of open-source collaboration, but Apache’s utility with the Internet combined with it’s incredible collaboration platform makes Apache extraordinary and inspiring.

I doubt that many computer programmers can imagine the Internet before Apache. Can any of us imagine the Internet without open-source software or without large amounts of online collaboration? I sure can’t. I don’t think the free software movement could ever act as if Apache never existed.