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Briefing: The Apache Way

Ask The Apache Software Foundation’s Members about The Apache Way and you’ll get as many answers as to what it is. In fact, we surveyed the greater Apache user and developer community and were fascinated with their responses


“The Apache Way to me…”


What makes The Apache Way so hard to define?

The Apache Way is a living, breathing interpretation of one’s experience with our community-led development process. Apache projects and their communities are unique, diverse, and focused on the activities needed at a particular stage of the project’s lifetime, including nurturing communities, developing great code, and building awareness. What is important is that they embrace:

...as well as restricted, day-to-day operational lists for Project Management Committees. Private decisions on code, policies, or project direction are disallowed; off-list discourse and transactions must be brought on-list. More on communications and the use of mailing lists.

Important:

There is no "one way" to The Apache Way. The ASF is not dictatorial and will never compel a rigid path to implement our process, as we believe flexibility is integral to The Apache Way to Sustainable Open Source Success.

"The unbroken success of Apache still has important lessons to teach us... The Apache community has succeeded not just in developing great code, it has managed to distil the essence of the development process and ethos in such a way that other cognate projects can adopt and adapt it." — Glyn Moody, "Learning from The Apache Way"

Our model, refined over the past 20 years, has produced some of the largest and longest-lived Open Source projects that have revolutionized the industry. We welcome constructive discussion on The Apache Way and look forward to doing so in person at a future Apache event.