Olinux: Tell us about our career: college, jobs, personal life (age, birth place)

Brian Behelendorf: I Went to University of California, Berkeley, from 1991-1994. Didn't graduate, got distracted by a job at Wired Magazine in 1993 and later HotWired, where I was the Chief Engineer at their launch in 1994. Around the same time co-founded Organic Online, a web site design shop. Left there in mid-1998 and then co-founded Collab.Net, where I now work.

Olinux: Where Apache headquarters are located?

Brian Behelendorf: There really is no headquarters, we're distributed. We are officially incorporated in Delaware, and our fax line/phone # for our secretary is in Maryland, but there's only one guy there. We are truly distributed.

Olinux: What are your responsibilities at Apache? Do you have any other jobs?

Brian Behelendorf: My responsibility is to help speak for Apache to the outside world, to evangelize a bit and to help make sure things internally run smoothly. I'm on the board of directors.

Olinux: How is Apache organized? Try to give us an idea of how Apache works?

Brian Behelendorf: Politically, we are a membership-based organization, with an elected board of directors. The members are developers who are invited by existing members based on their contributions to the group.

Olinux: How the work is coordinated and managed?

Brian Behelendorf: The software development is done without much serious coordination; basically we all just share a CVS tree and check in changes and enhancements. We do split it up by project and module, and each small subgroup has their own way of deciding what new features to add (or remove). Again, very decentralized.

Olinux: And the servers, directories...

Brian Behelendorf: The server sits at my company's colocation facility in San Francisco. It chews up a small amount of bandwidth, and is actually rather fun to support.

Olinux: What about funding?

Brian Behelendorf: We don't require any money to operate; it's only recently that we've started getting donations, so we're still figuring out what we want to spend it on. =)

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