1995: Apache is Born
By the early 1990s the Web was becoming a big deal, yet the software for serving websites remained closed. That changed in 1995, when a group of admins began collaborating to build the Apache HTTP Server. Based on another server platform developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which had been abandoned by its original developers, the Apache server quickly rose to prominence, claiming a majority of Web server market share by 1996. In the following years the purview of Apache developers, who endorsed more liberal licensing terms than those that governed GNU and Linux, expanded their purview by overseeing a number of other open source projects through the Apache Software Foundation, which launched in 1999.
By the early 1990s the Web was becoming a big deal, yet the software for serving websites remained closed. That changed in 1995, when a group of admins began collaborating to build the Apache HTTP Server. Based on another server platform developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which had been abandoned by its original developers, the Apache server quickly rose to prominence, claiming a majority of Web server market share by 1996. In the following years the purview of Apache developers, who endorsed more liberal licensing terms than those that governed GNU and Linux, expanded their purview by overseeing a number of other open source projects through the Apache Software Foundation, which launched in 1999.
