Apache Software Foundation (ASF)

Overview

American non-profit organization that supports open-source software projects. Maintains over 350 top-level projects used by millions worldwide.

Key Facts

  • Founded: 1999-02-01

  • Headquarters: Carrollton, Texas, USA

  • Status: Non-profit foundation

  • Founded to support the Apache HTTP Server project

  • Apache HTTP Server is the most popular web server (historically #1)

  • Projects include Kafka, Spark, Hadoop, Cassandra, Tomcat, Flink, Zeppelin

  • All ASF projects use the Apache License 2.0 (permissive open-source)

  • Apache Kafka is the leading event streaming platform

  • Apache Spark is the leading big data processing framework

  • Governance model: meritocratic, project-driven decision making

Products Mentioned in Wiki

Nginx | CNCF focuses on cloud-native; ASF focuses on broader application software