Brian Behlendorf Biography

Brian Behlendorf was born March 30, 1973 and is a technologist, computer programmer, and an important figure in the 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. Behlendorf has served on the board of the Mozilla Foundation since 2003.

Behlendorf, raised in Southern California, became interested in the early development of the Internet while he was a student at the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1990s. One of his first projects was an electronic mailing list and online music resource, SFRaves, 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 also founded a large online resource devoted to electronic music and related subcultures.

In 1993, Behlendorf, Jonathan Nelson, Matthew Nelson and Cliff Skolnick 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 HotWireds requirements.

It turned out that Behlendorf wasnt the only one busy patching the NCSA code at the time, so he and Cliff Skolnick put together an electronic mailing list to coordinate the work of the other programmers. By the end of February 1995, eight core contributors to the project started Apache as a fork of the NCSA codebase. 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 currently the CTO of the World Economic Forum and a Director of CollabNet, a company he co-founded with OReilly & Associates (now OReilly Media) in 1999 to develop tools for enabling collaborative, distributed software development. CollabNet used to be the primary corporate sponsor of the open source version control system Subversion, before it became a project of the Apache Software Foundation. He continues to be involved with electronic music community events such as Chillits, and speaks often at open source conferences worldwide.

In 2003, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.