From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Brian Behlendorf 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.
Having grown up in Southern California near NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Behlendorf became interested in the early development of the Internet while he was a student at the University of California-Berkeley in the early '90s. In 1993, Behlendorf and Jonathan Nelson 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, and he and Cliff Skolnick put together a 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 in 1999 to develop tools for enabling collaborative, open-source software development.
