Open Source at the ASF: A Year in Numbers, from Commits to Cash

The Apache Software Foundation has published its annual report for fiscal 2019. The hub of a sprawling, influential open source community, the ASF remains in rude good health, despite challenges this year including the need for “an outsized amount of effort” dealing with trademark infringements, and “some in the tech industry trying to exploit the goodwill earned by the larger Open Source community.”

Here’s some highlights of the ASF’s year, by the numbers…

7000+ Code Committers

The ASF has the guardianship of 190+ million lines of code across all of the Apache repositories. There are over 332 active ASF projects, with now 7,000+ code committers. Of them, 3,280 Committers changed 71,186,324 lines of code over 222,684 commits in 2019, driving 35 million page views per week across apache.org.

A Top Five…

Hadoop, Kafka, Lucene, POI, and ZooKeeper top this particular table, confirming, among other things, that Hadoop is far from dead in the water.

What are these, exactly?

Hadoop: A framework for distributed storage and processing of very large data sets across clusters of computers. Used by 30,044 companies.

Kafka: A publish-subscribe (pub-sub) messaging system that underpins distributed application event streaming platforms for Twitter, LinkedIn, more.

Lucene: A full-text search library in Java designed to make it easy to add search functionality to an application or website, used by Jira, Twitter, etc.

POI: Java libraries,API for manipulating various file formats based on the Office Open XML (OOXML) standard and OLE2 standard from Microsoft.

ZooKeeper: A centralised service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services for distributed applications: often used to fix bugs.

A Few More Top Fives…

The Top 5 Apache repositories by number of commits meannwhile were Camel, Hadoop, HBase, Beam, and Flink. The Top 5 Apache repositories by lines of code were NetBeans, OpenOffice, Flex, Mynewt, and Trafodion.

47…

New projects currently undergoing development in the Apache Incubator

The ASF: 10 Big Sponsors

The ASF names 10 “platinum” sponsors: AWS, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, the Pineapple Fund, Tencent Cloud, and Verizon Media

$20 Billion Value

The ASF codebase, meanwhile, is conservatively valued at least $20 billion. The foundation itself returned a small net profit for the year of $331,005.

The ASF said: “The ‘Apache Way’ of community-driven development is the process behind hundreds of freely-available enterprise-grade Apache projects that serve as the backbone for some of the most visible and widely used applications in Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning, Big Data, build management, Cloud Computing, content management, DevOps, IoT and Edge computing, mobile, servers, and Web frameworks, among many other categories.

“The ubiquity of Apache software is undeniable, with Apache projects managing exabytes of data, executing teraflops of operations, and storing billions of objects in virtually every industry. Apache software is an integral part of nearly every end user computing device, from laptops to tablets to phones. Apache software is used in every Internet-connected country on the planet.”