When people think of open-source software and its luminaries, they tend to think first of Linux and Linus Torvalds. When I asked Torvalds to suggest some other leading lights inside the open-source movement, the first person he named was Brian Behlendorf.
``Brian may not be that well-known to the general public,'' Torvalds said in an e-mail, ``but when it comes to tech people, what's more well-known than Apache?''
What's Apache, you ask? It's the Web server -- the software that dishes up the data your browser translates into a viewable page -- that powers a substantial portion of the world's Web sites: free for the taking, open to programmers who want to extend its capabilities and about as bulletproof as anything on the market. And its existence can be attributed in large part to Behlendorf's work.
He was a student at the University of California-Berkeley in the early 1990s when he got excited by the emerging Web. And he took a lead role in turning an early Web server from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign into a stable, ongoing development project.
Behlendorf grew up near NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, in a community where scientists' kids went to school. ``You could be cool and geeky at the same time,'' he said.
He was going to major in physics at Berkeley, but migrated toward computer science as he discovered the potential of the Net. He set up Wired magazine's first Web site, and helped create some of the earliest sites for major companies. Currently he's the chief technology officer at CollabNet in Burlingame, a company he co-founded to provide tools for people doing development projects in disparate locations.
In the late 1990s, Behlendorf and the Apache team created the Apache Software Foundation (www.apache.org). The mission was to maintain and upgrade Apache and related Web projects, and to keep up the community spirit that helped make it so successful. Behlendorf served as president of the foundation for three years, and remains on its board of directors.
