July 2014 must have been one of the luckiest months for Apache Software Foundation (ASF), two remarkable achievements have been posted on their blog site in July 30. With the “fix test failure” commit by Daniel Kulp for the Apache CXF Project last July 14, ASF has reached more than two million commits, and this is only four years after they achieved their first million. Additionally, Apache email archives now have over 11 million messages.
According to James Governor, Analyst and Founder at RedMonk, “Project commits is a useful measure of community health”. Compared to ASF’s first million commits which happened 10 years after they started, the rapid increase in commits in just four years started when the Git has been introduced to the source code management system. Subversion (SVN) repository was already decentralized, Apache now uses Github with 564 different repositories and is amplified by another 268 Git repositories.
Meanwhile, David Nalley, Vice President of ASF Infrastructure said that they are distributing terabytes of artifacts per week. In the case of Apache OpenOffice, petabytes worth of artifacts have already been distributed. Keeping ASF’s infrastructure running 24/7 every year is the responsibility of a team composed of four paid staff and 10 rotating volunteers located on four continents.
Apache Software Foundation, with over 450 individual Members and 3,500 Committers who work together, has been and continuously developing software utilized by millions around the world since 1999. After 15 years in the industry, the foundation was able to produce over 200 open source projects such as Apache HTTP Server project which is considered as “the world’s most popular Web server software”. Currently, there are 33 “podlings” being develop in the Apache Incubator, and 38 technical initiatives in the Apache Labs. Aside from that, a number of “industry-defining technologies and tools” were distributed under the Apache License like Cassandra, CouchDB, Tomcat, and Hadoop to name a few.