Brian Behlendorf (Born March 30, 1973) is one of the most respected leaders of the international open-source software movement. He 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. One of his first programming projects was an email list and online music resource, SFRaves.org, which a friend persuaded him to start in 1992. Behlendorf was an early participant and the chief technology guru for the Burning Man festival, and later founded a larger online music resource, Hyperreal.org.
In 1993, Behlendorf, Jonathan Nelson, Cliff Skolnick, and Jonathan Steuer 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 with O'Reilly & Associates (now O'Reilly Media) in 1999 to develop tools for enabling collaborative, open-source software development.
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