Brian Behlendorf
Brian Behlendorf (Born
March 30,
1973) is one of several leaders of the international
open-source software movement. He was a primary developer of the
Apache Web server, the most popular
web server software on the
Internet, and a founding member of the Apache Group, which later became the
Apache Software Foundation. Behlendorf served as President of the Foundation for three years, and remains on its Board of Directors.
Behlendorf, raised in Southern California, became interested in the early development of the Internet while he was a student at the
University of California, Berkeley in the early
1990s. One of his first projects was an
electronic mailing list and online music resource,
SFRaves, which a friend persuaded him to start in
1992. Behlendorf was an early participant and the chief technology guru for the
Burning Man festival, and also founded
Hyperreal, a large online resource devoted to
electronic music and related subcultures.
In
1993, Behlendorf, Jonathan Nelson, Matthew Nelson and Cliff Skolnick co-founded Organic, Inc., the first business dedicated to building commercial web sites. While developing the first online, for-profit, media project — the
HotWired web site for
Wired Magazine — in
1994, they realized that the
most commonly used web server software at the time (developed at the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) could not handle the user registration system that the company required. So, Behlendorf patched the open-source code to support HotWired's requirements.
It turned out that Behlendorf wasn't the only one busy patching the NCSA code at the time, so he and Cliff Skolnick put together an electronic mailing list to coordinate the work of the other programmers. By the end of February
1995, eight core contributors to the project formed the Apache Group. Working loosely together, they eventually rewrote the entire original program as the
Apache HTTP Server. In
1999, the project incorporated as the Apache Software Foundation.
Behlendorf is now the Chief Technology Officer at
CollabNet, a company he co-founded with O'Reilly & Associates (now
O'Reilly Media) in 1999 to develop tools for enabling collaborative, distributed software development. CollabNet is also the primary corporate sponsor of
Subversion, an Open Source version control system.
*
Back to the source in the desert.
ChloeVeltman.com. September 6, 2001
*
The Apache Software Foundation*
Personal homepage*
Organic, Inc.*
CollabNet
