Brian Behlendorf is a software developer best known as one of the founders of the Apache HTTP Server project and a co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation. He has described the project’s earliest days himself: in a 2019 interview he recalled that Apache “was still being built by a group of people whose only connection to each other was that they were all on an email mailing list,” sharing the ability to commit to a CVS repository and shell access to a Unix box he maintained off Wired magazine’s internet connection.
In that same account, Behlendorf explained the practical motivation behind the work. Continuing to improve the existing NCSA web server collaboratively was, in his words, “easier and certainly a lot cheaper than buying Netscape’s commercial web server,” and he valued having “other people out there who can review my code and work together with.” That instinct toward shared, reviewable, openly maintained code became a recurring theme in his career.
Behlendorf went on to work across much of the infrastructure that the open-source world depends on. He helped lead the Apache Software Foundation, the nonprofit that holds and governs the Apache projects, and he was involved with CollabNet, the company that sponsored the creation of the Subversion version-control system. He later directed the Hyperledger blockchain project and the Open Source Security Foundation, continuing to focus on the organizations and tooling that let large groups of strangers build software together.
His through-line is collaboration infrastructure rather than any single product: mailing lists, shared repositories, foundations, and review-driven development. The story he tells of Apache, where a loose group connected only by email built one of the most widely deployed pieces of software in history, captures the model of distributed open-source collaboration that the rest of the industry later adopted.