Apache Software Foundation

While the Apache project is a diverse and exciting project the Apache Software Foundation does not seems to be very exciting. It has a healthy budget and a number of contributors. It is just working.

Membership

The members of the foundation are people who are involved in one the projects of the Apache Foundation. They are nominated and then accepted (or not) by the existing members. Currently there are about 260 members.

Management

The Board of Directors consists of 9 people. They are elected by the members annually. There are also a lot of officers. Each Apache based project has a VP and there are more VPs for various general subjects.

Finances and Funding

The sponsorship page tells us that the levels of sponsorship range from 5K USD (Bronze) to 100K USD (Platinum). On the thank you page where the sponsors are listed we find 3 Platinum sponsors (100K), 2 Gold sponsors (40K), 2 Silver sponsor (20K), and 6 Bronze sponsors (5K).

That adds up to 470K for a year as revenue from the sponsors.

In 2009 the Apache Foundation reported 317K USD revenue.

I am not sure what is the source of the difference between these two numbers but that might be due to some of the sponsors on that page joining only in the middle of 2009 or in 2010.

They also reported 236K USD expenses and were left with 343K USD assets at the end of the year. The expenses were divided more or less equally between Infrastructure services (hosting, version control, bug tracking, etc) on one hand and Marketing and PR on the other.

Reporting

The financial reports are a bit out of date on the public records page and I have not seen a budget or some details on how the money was spent.

There is also the ASF blog with a post every week or two.

More info

Shane Curcuru sent me a number of additional links that are worth looking at: