jonathan carter

Happy Birthday, Apache HTTP Server!

// February 23rd, 2010 // Free Software

Today marks the birthday of one of my favourite free software projects and software, the Apache HTTP server.  Why do I like it? It’s well supported on many platforms, well documented and it’s one of those pieces of software that almost never really gives me any hassles and does what it promises too. It was also one of the killer apps that drove Linux adoption in the early days before it had as many uses as it has today.

The Apache Foundation blog has a great entry on this birthday and the project’s history, detailing out some important dates and also memes that are now widely used in free software communities pretty much everywhere, for example, the -1/+0/+1 voting style was established by the Apache community that people in the Ubuntu community for one would be familiar with. Talking of Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth who founded the project was also the first person to package and maintain the Apache server packages in Debian. Today Debian (and its derivatives) is one of the greatest systems to run Apache on, especially since it’s configuration makes it so easy to drop in additional configuration using tools such as Puppet and also the Debian’s packaging system.

Happy 15h’th birthday Apache and thanks for all the years of great software so far!