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ASF Flagship Project is World’s Most Popular Web Server, Powering More than 112 Million Websites

FOREST HILL, MD, 23 February, 2010 — The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) — developers, stewards, and incubators of 138 Open Source projects — today announced the 15th anniversary of the Apache HTTP Web Server.

The ASF’s first project became the world’s most popular Web server software within the first six months of its inception. The Apache HTTP Server today powers nearly 112 million Websites world-wide.

A triumph for the all-volunteer Foundation, the Apache HTTP Server reliably delivers petabytes of data across the world’s most demanding uses, including real-time news sources, Fortune 100 enterprise portals, cloud computing clusters, financial services platforms, mission-critical military intelligence applications, aerospace communications networks, and more. The server software can be downloaded, modified and installed by anyone free of charge.

History

The Apache Server started as a fork (an independent development stream)
of the NCSA httpd, a Web server created by Rob McCool at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Further development to the server ceased after McCool’s departure from NCSA in 1994, so an online community of individuals was formed to support and enhance its software via email collaboration. The founding members of that community (the Apache Group) included Brian Behlendorf, Roy Fielding, Rob Hartill, David Robinson, Cliff Skolnick, Randy Terbush, Robert Thau, and Andrew Wilson.

Within less than a year of the Apache Group’s formation, the Apache server surpassed NCSA httpd as the #1 server on the Internet.

In March 1999, members of the Apache Group formed The Apache Software Foundation to provide organizational, legal, and financial support for the Apache HTTP Server. An additional goal for the Foundation was to serve as a neutral, trusted platform for the development of community-driven software.

Growth, the “Apache Way”

Beyond the Apache HTTP Server, dozens of ASF projects – from build tools to Web services to cloud computing and more – lead the way in Open Source technology.

At the ASF, community plays a vital role in the collaborative development of consensus-driven, enterprise-grade solutions. The number of projects led by the Apache community has grown from the singular Apache HTTP Server at the ASF’s inception in 1999 to nearly 140 projects today.

The ASF’s commitment to fostering a collaborative approach to development has long served as a model for producing consistently high quality software and helping advance the future of open development. Through its leadership, robust community, and meritocratic process known as the “Apache Way”, the ASF continues to gain recognition as one of the most successful influencers in Open Source.

Through the Apache Way, the ASF is able to spearhead new projects that meet the demands of the marketplace and help users achieve their business goals. With the Apache Incubator mentoring more projects than ever before, the ASF continues to meet the growing demand for quality Open Source products.

“Community Over Code”: among the Foundation’s core tenets is open collaboration through respectful, honest, technically-focused interaction. The ASF’s success is testament to its outstanding community efforts that serve as best practices widely embraced by organizations and individuals alike.

“If it didn’t happen on-list, it didn’t happen”: building upon the transparency-oriented culture of the Apache Group, whose collaboration took place on email lists, millions of messages are archived on Apache publicly-accessible mailing lists, documenting the ASF’s achievements over the past decade.

“Meritocracy in Action”: the ASF’s tagline reflects an average of 10,000 code contributions (commits) made each month. The ASF is responsible for millions of lines of code by more than 2,000 ASF Committers and countless contributors across the Open Source landscape. Nearly 500 community-driven modules have been developed to extend functionality of the Apache HTTP Server alone.

Milestones

February 23, 1994: Individual patch authors around the world are invited to join the “new-httpd” mailing list to discuss enhancements and future releases of NCSA httpd. The Apache name was chosen for this new effort within the first few days of discussion, along with basic rules for email-based collaboration and a mission to replace the existing server with a standards-based, open source, and extensible software system.

March 15, 1994: Apache-style voting created (+1, 0, -1; with ‘-1′ meaning ‘no’, ‘0′ meaning ‘neutral’, and ‘+1′ meaning ‘yes.’)

March 18, 1994: First Apache Group release (Apache 0.2)

Apache server v.1.0 was released in December 1995. Four years later, Apache HTTP Server v.1.3.0 was released, and rapidly becoming the most popular Web server on the planet.

Apache HTTP Server v.2.0 alpha was released in March 2000, with the first general availability release two years later. V.2.0 remained best-of-breed sever until the release of v.2.2.0 in December 2005, and is widely deployed across the Internet.

In February 2009, the Apache HTTP Server became the first Web server software in history to surpass the 100 million Website milestone.

The most current, best-of-breed, stable version of the Apache HTTP Server is v.2.2.14, released September 2009. Developers seeking to test new features and preview what will become stable Version 2.4 are able to do so today with the development of v.2.3.5.

Earlier this month, after ten years and more than forty revisions, the Apache HTTP Server v.1.3.x officially reached end of life status with the release of v.1.3.42. Future patches to v.1.3.x will be for critical security updates only.

The Apache HTTP Server remains the world’s most beloved Web server, forming the backbone of nearly 70% of all sites on the Internet.

Availability

The Apache HTTP Server is available for a variety of operating systems, including Unix, Linux, GNU, FreeBSD, Netware, Solaris, Windows, Mac OS X, OS/2, TPF, and eCS. In addition, the Apache HTTP Server is redistributed through many proprietary software packages such as WebSphere, Oracle RDBMS, Kylix, NetWare, and Delphi, as well as numerous Linux distributions.

All ASF projects, including the Apache HTTP Server, are available free of charge under the Apache Software License v.2.0. To download, or for more information, visit http://httpd.apache.org/

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)

Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than seventy leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server — the world’s most popular Web server software. Through The ASF’s meritocratic process known as “The Apache Way,” more than 300 individual Members and 2,000 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation’s official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Facebook, Google, HP, Microsoft, Progress Software, SpringSource, and Yahoo! For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/.

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The first free Unix-like operating system available on the IBM PC was 386BSD, of which Linus Torvalds said in 1993: “If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never have happened.”

386BSD was a direct descendant of Bill Joy’s Berkeley Software Distribution, which was the core of SunOS and other proprietary Unix distributions. 386BSD and the patchkit for the port to the Intel chip formed the basis for FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, which have carried the torch for BSD and open source Unix to this day.

Lars Wirzenius, a student friend of Linus Torvalds, recalled: “FreeBSD didn’t exist then. 386BSD did, but it wouldn’t have worked on my computer, since it required a 387 co-processor. I used SCO Xenix from fall 1991 to spring or summer of 1992, until Linux matured enough to be a usable environment for writing code.”

Alan Cox tells a similar story. When he saw the 386BSD announce he thought “Woah! – finally there is something worth running on a PC.”

The trouble was that 386BSD needed floating point hardware, and Linux didn’t. “I hadn’t got the floating point chip, which was 70 quid at the time, so I installed Linux,” he said.

386BSD was a long time coming. The first public release (Version 0.0) was on St. Patrick’s Day, 1991, and was barely functional. Most users had to wait until Bastille Day, 1992 for the first functional release (Version 0.1).

A year or two earlier, a couple of small fixes, and Linux may never have seen the light of day.

What ifs

The most popular of the BSDs is FreeBSD. FreeBSD, like the other BSDs, had a 15 year start on Linux, based as it was on BSD Unix, which had played a large part in defining the standards for operating systems and networking that have held good to the present day. For much of its early history, FreeBSD was technically superior to Linux and still retains an enviable reputation for reliability.

So it is interesting to speculate why Linux, and not FreeBSD, became the flag bearer, not only for free software, but for Unix-like operating systems.

BSD had been around for a long time, and Linux grew from small beginnings. Most of the early contributors to Linux and the projects that sprang from the early success of Linux, were hobbyists and students with no great history in computing, yet GNU/Linux, not FreeBSD, was adopted by the traditional Unix companies to become the universal operating system that Unix had promised to be.

Could have been a contender

FreeBSD didn’t stagnate, or lose, and is probably healthier that it ever was, big on networking devices, friendly with web hosting companies and big with Apple, but hasn’t had the impact of Linux on the rest of the computing industry, despite an enviable record for technical excellence.

Any number of reasons can be given for this. During the period 1992-1994, when GNU/Linux was beginning to emerge as a viable option for Intel servers, the BSDs were the subject of a copyright dispute between USL and BSDi, which was indisputably a setback to uptake and development, but the BSDs bounced back from this setback and were the favoured solution for many web and ftp servers during the dotcom boom.

In 1999, “Walnut Creek CD-ROM set the world record for most bytes of network traffic processed in 24 hours by a single host: One single-processor PII box (a then-famous FreeBSD ftp server) handled 1.39 terabytes. (This burst of traffic was, ironically, occasioned by the release on that machine of Slackware 4.0.)”

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FreeBSD is the most accessible and popular of the BSDs, has code at the heart of Darwin and Apple’s OS X, and has powered some of the more successful sites on the Web, including Hotmail, Netcraft and Yahoo!, which before the rise of Google was the busiest site on the internet.

FreeBSD rose from the ashes of 386BSD, the original effort to port BSD to the Intel chip, and claims a code lineage that reaches back to Bill Joy’s Berkeley Software Distribution of the late seventies. The 386BSD port was begun in 1989 by Bill and Lynne Jolitz, and was destined to be the original free Unix-like operating system for the IBM PC. The first public release of 386BSD (Version 0.0) was on St. Patrick’s Day, 1991, accompanied by a series of articles in Dr Dobbs journal, which documented the process.

The first functional release of 386BSD was Version 0.1, which was released on Bastille Day, 1992.

FreeBSD emerged in 1993, after the self-imposed task of supporting 386BSD on their own had proved too much for Bill and Lynne Jolitz. The patchkit which had been the underpinning for the BSD port to the 386 was revived and became the basis for the first FreeBSD release.

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If you were sat at your Linux computer one dark evening in late 1999, things would have been considerably different. Your machine would probably be running either Red Hat 6.1 or Mandrake 6. Outside your window, the world was going crazy for all things dotcom. Microsoft was prepping both Windows 2000 and its ill-fated Millennium edition, while Apple had just released OS 9 and its Power Mac G4.

As a Linux user, you’d have been an uber-geek, someone with an obsessive interest in computing and far too much time on your hands. But things have changed. Linux is now an operating system anyone can install and use, and it’s growing stronger every year. Here’s how it happened.

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Crypto pioneer and Sun Microsystems’ veteran chief security officer Whitfield Diffie has left the company, with database-giant Oracle’s acquisition still in the air.

According to Technology Review, Diffie is slated to be a visiting professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, after 18 years at Sun, latterly in the high-profile security role as chief security officer.

It’s unclear why Diffie left Sun and whether his exit was related to Oracle’s pending take over or recent layoffs. Oracle, as ever, declined to comment. Diffie, if you’re reading, drop us an email.

Diffie is famous for his ground-breaking invention of public key cryptography – PKI – in 1975. PKI today is taken for granted because it’s used so widely to protect emails, documents, and commerce in every-day online communications and business.

It’s worth remembering that it was Diffie who helped make this a reality. He sparred with spooks and US politicians, as the government attempted to limit who could use crypto in the interests of “national security.”

Diffie joined Sun in 1991 and in 2002 was named chief security officer, with the mission of leading a global initiative to evangelize Sun’s security offerings. He was also tasked with talking about major issues in relation to technology security.

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, California, Nov. 4, 2009 – SourceForge, Inc. (NASDAQ: LNUX) today announced that it has changed its name to Geeknet, Inc. to more accurately reflect the company’s business and the growing market it serves. The name change also supports the company’s intention to expand the reach of its online advertising services into new categories.

“Renaming the company Geeknet is the latest step in our rapid transformation,” said Scott L. Kauffman, President & CEO of Geeknet. “Our new name is a more accurate articulation of our business. With Geeknet as our calling card on Madison Avenue, we are now able to clearly define the audience we serve and more effectively capture the business opportunity that we are addressing.”

The Geeknet network, which includes SourceForge, Slashdot, ThinkGeek and Ohloh, among others, serves a global community of nearly 40 million geeks each month. These tech-savvy professionals and enthusiasts are affluent, well-educated and command significant spending power.

Kauffman continued, “The geek demographic is bigger than most people realize, and it is growing every day in both scope and influence. Its product appeal extends beyond servers and slide rules to include video games, soft drinks, automobiles, fast food, fashion, entertainment, consumer electronics and other goods. We call this phenomenon the ‘geekification’ of the world, and we believe that our network provides the best platform for advertisers to reach this highly coveted audience.”

To support the new brand, the company is immediately launching a series of programs to raise awareness of Geeknet.
About Geeknet

Geeknet is the online network for the global geek community. Our sites include SourceForge, Slashdot, ThinkGeek, Ohloh and freshmeat. We serve an audience of nearly 40 million users* each month and provide the tech-obsessed with content, culture, connections, commerce, and all the things that geeks crave. Want to learn more? Check out geek.net.

(* September 2009 Unique Visitors 38.9M. Source: Google Analytics and Omniture)

Geeknet is a trademark of Geeknet, Inc. SourceForge, Slashdot, ThinkGeek, Ohloh and freshmeat are registered trademarks of Geeknet, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks or product names are the property of their respective owners.

NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS: This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are based on our current expectations, and involve risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements contained herein include statements regarding the potential benefits of our corporate rebranding for us and advertisers interested in our target market, growth strategies and prospects for our online media and e-commerce businesses, and our initiatives to raise awareness of our corporate rebranding. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in such forward-looking statements due to various factors, including: our ability to attract and retain qualified personnel; success in designing and offering innovative online advertising programs; decreases or delays in online advertising spending, especially in light of current macroeconomic challenges and uncertainty; our effectiveness at planning and managing our e-commerce inventory; our ability to achieve and sustain higher levels of revenue; our ability to protect and defend our intellectual property rights; rapid technological and market change; unforeseen expenses that we may incur in future quarters; and competition with, and pricing pressures from larger and/or more established competitors. Investors should consult our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, sec.gov, including the risk factors section of our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended July 31, 2008, and our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2009, for further information regarding these and other risks of our business. All forward-looking statements included in this press release are based upon information available to us as of the date hereof, and we do not assume any obligations to update such statements or the reasons why actual results could differ materially from those projected in such statements.

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As e-mail turns 30, here’s why Sendmail, the granddaddy of all mail transfer agents, still rules the roost

Somehow e-mail lives on despite spam, instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Heck, if it weren’t for e-mail notifications, I’d never check my Facebook page. But what’s driving e-mail these days?

A look at MailRadar.com shows that Sendmail is still the No. 1 MTA (mail transfer agent) in use today, followeded by Postfix, while Qmail is a distant third. And dear God, someone is still using MMDF. Surprisingly, Microsoft Exchange isn’t even in the mix, which casts doubt on the validity of those numbers, but it’s probably safe to say that Sendmail remains the top MTA.

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It has often been said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. For the internet, that first step was more of a stumble.

At 2100, on 29 October 1969, engineers 400 miles apart at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and Stanford Research Institute (SRI) prepared to send data between the first nodes of what was then known as Arpanet.

It got the name because it was commissioned by the US Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa).

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