Open Source Software: The Apache Foundation

Open source software is part of a movement within computing to develop top quality software projects that meet the needs of large groups and that are available for free under a no-royalty license.

The people behind the Apache Foundation are volunteers who contribute to the organization at a variety of levels. Each of the Apache Open Source Software projects comprise a community of organizers, developers (known as committers) who build the project, and participants who use the software, apply it to their own work and who join in to discussions, mailing lists, meet-ups and full scale conferences.

If you are interested in becoming a committer, see the guide at this link: Committers

Apache Foundation Officers

For Apache Foundation as a whole, there are officers, including chairman, vice chairman, and a long list of vice presidents. The current chairman is Doug Cutting, the current vice chair is Greg Stein.

For a full list of officers, go to this link: Apache Officers

Apache Foundation Members

Membership in the Apache Foundation is by invitation. Apache Foundation Members are individuals who have made substantial contributions to specific projects as committers and to the community as a whole through their participation in meet-ups, in discussion groups and in conference presentations. Members have shown a dedication to Open Source and to helping participants who have questions.

For a list of Apache Foundation Members go to this link: Apache Foundation Members

The person shown in this photograph is Isabel Drost,, Apache Foundation Member and organizer of the Berlin Buzzwords 2011 Conference. She is shown during a keynote session at the conference, keeping an eye on the audience to see if anyone needs a microphone. Isabel Drost is also a committer for the Apache Mahout Project.

An important form of support that the nonprofit Apache Foundation offers to Apache projects is the Apache License. Currently it is in version 2.0. The Apache License is a legally binding software license that makes it easy and reasonable for individual, volunteer and commercials users to deploy Apache software. The license allows users to download the software for free, to incorporate it into their own projects and to distribute those projects. It does require attribution of the Apache software.

For an FAQ about the Apache license, go to this link from the Apache Foundation:

Apache License FAQ

The how-to book on Mahout, Mahout in Action, was just published in October 2011 by publisher Manning. Three of the four authors are Mahout core committers.

For a temporary 37% discount on all formats of the book, go to the Manning site and use THIS DISCOUNT CODE: mahout37

Manning's Mahout in Action

One of the best known Apache Foundation projects is Apache Hadoop. This collaborative project develops open-source software for "reliable, scalable distributive computing". Hadoop central is found at

Apache Hadoop Official Site

Started in 2006 by chief committer Doug Cutting, Hadoop is now a widely used foundational software for handling big data projects. It has been used by industry leaders including Amazon, Facebook, Google and LinkedIn."

Apache Mahout is a project that aims at making scalable machine learning libraries. The approach can be based on Apache Hadoop, but that is not always the case. Because of the yellow elephant logo and theme of Hadoop, committers chose the name "Mahout" in honor of the Indian term for the person who drives the elephant. The Mahout logo reflects that connection with a person atop the yellow elphant.

Applications of Mahout include recommendation, clustering, classification and frequent itemset mininig. Mahout can efficiently handle data sets in the millions.

For details, go to the official Apache Mahout site at this link:

Apache Mahout Official Site.

The official site for Apache Zookeeper defines the project this way, "ZooKeeper is a centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services."

For more information on Zookeeper, go to this link:

Apache Zookeeper Official Site

Apache Lucene provides Java-based indexing and search implementation. For more information about Apache Lucene incudign updates about some core problems in July 2011, please go to the official Lucene site:

Apache Lucene Official Site

To get further involved with Apache Foundation and its projects, consider signing up for one or more of the Apache Mailing lists:

Apache Foundation Mailing Lists

A major North American conference for the Apache Foundation community and projects was held in Vancouver, B.C. from 7-11 November 2011. For more information, go to this link:

ApacheCON 2011

In September 2011, Apache Foundation marked the 10th anniversary of one of its major projects, Lucene. This news article describes the life of Lucene from inception to its current role driving smart search functions for sites that include Twitter, Wikipedia, LinkedIn and Apple.

CLICK THIS LINK: 10th Anniversary Apache Lucene