Established in 1999, the ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors. Our all-volunteer board oversees more than 350 leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server -- the world's most popular Web server software.

The ASF provides an established framework for intellectual property and financial contributions that simultaneously limits potential legal exposure for our project committers. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 620 individual Members and 5,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo.