Apache Software Foundation
platformNon-profit foundation stewarding Apache Airflow and other open-source projects.
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is a U.S. non-profit corporation, incorporated in Delaware in 1999, that provides governance, legal, and infrastructure support for a large portfolio of open-source software projects. It is the steward of Apache Airflow, the open-source data-orchestration platform, alongside projects including Apache Kafka, Spark, Hadoop, and the Apache HTTP Server. The ASF operates as a distributed, largely volunteer organisation.
Our Take
When we recommend Apache Airflow to clients, the ASF governance is part of the recommendation: vendor-neutral stewardship lowers the risk that the orchestrator becomes a single company's captive product. — Rafal Fila, ShadowGen
What Sets Apache Software Foundation Apart
The ASF's vendor-neutral governance is the reason projects like Airflow can accept contributions from competing companies without any one of them controlling the codebase, which is itself a durability signal for the software it stewards.
Key Achievements
About Apache Software Foundation
The Apache Software Foundation is a non-profit that hosts and governs open-source software projects developed by self-governing communities of contributors. Founded in 1999 from the group behind the Apache HTTP Server, the ASF created a governance model, the "Apache Way," that emphasises meritocratic project leadership, consensus decision-making, and a permissive license. The Apache License 2.0 is one of the most widely used open-source licenses and is favoured by companies because it places few restrictions on commercial use.
The ASF does not sell software or operate commercially. It provides the legal entity, trademark protection, release infrastructure, and governance framework that let projects accept corporate and individual contributions without any single company controlling them. For the automation and data-engineering field, the foundation's most relevant project is Apache Airflow, the de facto open-source standard for batch data-pipeline orchestration, which graduated to a top-level Apache project in 2019. Commercial Airflow offerings from vendors such as Astronomer, Amazon, and Google are built on the ASF-stewarded codebase.