Apache HTTP Server Released — "A Patchy Server" Holds Up the Web

In April 1995, a small group of eight web administrators released Apache HTTP Server 0.6.2. The coordinator was Brian Behlendorf, then running the website for Wired magazine.

The name came from the project's origin: it was a collection of patches to NCSA HTTPd (the dominant web server at the time, whose development had stalled). "A patchy server." That it shared a name with a Native American nation was almost accidental; the feather logo came later.

Within a year, this patch-set was the most-used web server in the world. It would hold the largest market share for more than twenty years. Through the late 1990s and the entire 2000s, the physical substrate of the web ran, in large part, on Apache.

Why NCSA HTTPd Stalled

NCSA HTTPd, written by Rob McCool at the University of Illinois NCSA in 1993, was the de facto web server of the early web—the same lab had produced the Mosaic browser. In 1994 McCool left to join Netscape. NCSA did not staff a successor and development effectively stopped.

Meanwhile, web administrators around the world kept applying their own patches to NCSA HTTPd. Each site was reinventing the same fixes in isolation. Behlendorf observed this duplication, started the new-httpd mailing list with Cliff Skolnick in February 1995, and within weeks had gathered eight participants from Los Angeles, Boston, Maryland, Germany, and Hawaii. None of them had ever met in person. Distributed development began without that being a goal.

The Original Eight and "Apache Group"

The original Apache Group:

• Brian Behlendorf (coordinator; later first president of the Apache Software Foundation)
• Roy T. Fielding (later author of the REST dissertation and contributor to HTTP/1.1)
• Rob Hartill
• David Robinson
• Cliff Skolnick
• Randy Terbush
• Robert Thau
• Andrew Wilson

Worth singling out: Roy Fielding. He participated deeply in Apache's design while simultaneously working on HTTP/1.1 at the IETF; in 2000 he would publish the REST dissertation. The same person was shaping the protocol of the web and a reference implementation of it at once—a rare convergence.

Apache Group's governance was unusual for the time. There was no "benevolent dictator". Decisions were made on the mailing list by merit-based consensus and votes. This model—public discussion, public votes, votes determined by demonstrated commitment to the codebase—propagated into many later open-source projects.

Why Apache Won

From 1996, Microsoft IIS (on Windows NT) and the commercial Netscape Enterprise Server entered the market. Apache was free, open source, and portable; combined with Linux, it was decisive.

The acronym LAMP (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP/Perl/Python) appeared around 1998. It became the default execution environment for web developers; nearly every dot-com era startup launched on this stack.

Per Netcraft's web server survey:

• 1996 — less than a year after the group formed, Apache passes NCSA HTTPd to take the lead
• April 2009 — 67.56% of the top million busiest sites, the level at which Netcraft began publishing that metric
• April 2019 — nginx passes Apache across all sites in the survey; the lead changes hands after twenty-three years
• March 2023 — nginx passes Apache in the top million busiest sites too (21.37% to 21.18%), both behind Cloudflare since that January

Apache License and the Open-Source Economy

Apache HTTP Server originally shipped under a custom Apache License, restructured in 2004 as the Apache License 2.0.

The crucial difference from the GPL is that Apache 2.0 is not copyleft. Code released under Apache 2.0 can be modified and redistributed without releasing the modifications. A company can incorporate Apache-licensed code into a closed product without any obligation to open-source the product.

That property anchored Apache 2.0 as the default licence of the 2010s cloud era:

• Kubernetes (Google → CNCF): Apache 2.0
• Apache Spark / Hadoop / Kafka: Apache 2.0
• Android Open Source Project: Apache 2.0
• TensorFlow, parts of PyTorch: Apache 2.0 family
• Swift (Apple): Apache 2.0

By cornering the "permissive licence that companies can adopt freely" niche, Apache 2.0 sits alongside the GPL family as the two great licence currents of contemporary open source.

Apache Software Foundation

In June 1999 the group incorporated as the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), a 501(c)(3) non-profit in Delaware. The Foundation became a legal vehicle for community-owned software—neither a personal project nor a corporate asset.

ASF today hosts hundreds of top-level projects. Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, Cassandra, Lucene, Tomcat—the spine of modern big-data and web infrastructure.

Out of First Place, Still Everywhere

In 2026, Apache HTTP Server no longer leads the web server market (Nginx and Cloudflare are ahead). But:

• Apache still serves roughly a fifth of all websites in Netcraft's survey
• ASF projects sit at the core of AI and big-data infrastructure (Spark, Kafka, Hadoop, Beam)
• Apache License 2.0 is, alongside MIT, the standard choice for new permissive open-source projects

A "patch set" assembled by eight people who never met in person now underwrites a wing of the legal and technical foundation of the cloud-native era. Apache HTTP Server in 1995 marks the moment open source stopped being only a movement of ideas and became a system actually running the physical layer of the web.