The ASF

Yesterday, I was talking to my dad, who works in communication for an IT department, but has no technical training. I mentioned Tomcat, and he asked me, “Why would anyone give it away?”

I know the original codebase was a gift from Sun, and I can understand why they would want to give it away: to get people writing in Java. But I was less sure about why Apache would want to.

Fortunately, on the Apache News blog, they recently posted How the ASF works! – The Apache Software Foundation.

In short, they want to give away high quality software. It’s their philosophy. Who are we to argue?