The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation, incorporated in Delaware, USA, in June of 1999. The ASF is a natural outgrowth of The Apache Group, a group of individuals that was initially formed in 1995 to develop the Apache HTTP Server.

The management of the Foundation is overseen by a board of directors, who are elected by the ASF membership on an annual basis according to the corporation's bylaws. The board appoints a set of officers to manage the day-to-day operations of the Foundation and oversee the ASF projects. Each project is managed by a self-selected team of technical experts who are active contributors to the project, according to whatever guidelines for collaborative development are best suited to that project.

The Foundation was formed primarily to

1. provide a foundation for open, collaborative software development projects by supplying hardware, communication, and business infrastructure;
2. create an independent legal entity to which companies and individuals can donate resources and be assured that those resources will be used for the public benefit;
3. provide a means for individual volunteers to be sheltered from legal suits directed at the Foundation's projects; and,
4. protect the 'Apache' brand, as applied to its software products, from being abused by other organizations.

The current list of ASF members may be found on the Web at <http://www.apache.org/foundation/members.html>.

The Apache Software Foundation is a meritocracy, which means that in order to become a member you must first be actively contributing to one or more of the Foundation's collaborative projects. New candidates for membership are nominated by an existing member and then put to vote; a majority of the existing membership must approve a candidate in order to the candidate to be accepted.

This is an area the Foundation is currently studying. At the moment, only individuals may be members, but companies may be represented to ASF by individuals.

The current list of projects operating under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation can be found at <http://www.apache.org/foundation/projects.html>.

As a corporate entity, the Apache Software Foundation is able to be a party to contracts, such as for technical services or guarantee-bonds for conferences. It can also accept donations on behalf of its projects, clarifying the associated tax issues, and create additional self-funded services via community-building activities, such as Apache-related T-shirts and user conferences.

In addition, the Foundation provides a framework for limiting the legal exposure of individual volunteers while they work on behalf of one of the ASF projects. In the past, these volunteers have been personally vulnerable to lawsuits, whether legitimate or frivolous, which impaired many activities that might have significantly improved contributions to the projects and benefited our users.

There are many ways you can make a valuable contribution to the Foundation.

Instructions for donating money can be found on our contributing page.

The tax status of the ASF is discussed on our contributing page.

The Apache Software Foundation will eventually spread its wings to encompass more collaborative, open-source software projects. However, at the present time we have our hands full setting up the relationships among our existing projects. If you send us a proposal for a new project, we will certainly read it, but we may not have time to consider adopting it as a new ASF project until we have the resources available.