The Apache Software Foundation needs more than code

There was a common and recurring chorus in the keynote speeches of tech CEO’s during the first half of this decade, “Mobile, social, big data and cloud”. Whether it was EMC’s Joe Tucci, IBM’s Ginni Rometty, HP’s Meg Whitman, Salesforce’s Mark Benioff or SAP’s Bill McDermott speaking, they were emphatic that these four forces that would fuel and shape the digital era.

They were right, but they missed something. Open Source, and, more specifically, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) projects which provide some of the most innovative software on the planet, free of charge.

It’s hard to know whether big data would have taken off as quickly as it did without Apache Hadoop and all of the Apache projects around it: Apache Pig, Apache Hive, Apache HBase, Apache Phoenix, Apache Spark, Apache ZooKeeper, Cloudera Impala, Apache Flume, Apache Sqoop, Apache Oozie, and Apache Storm as well as the project’s passionate individual contributors and code committers who got, and get, their paychecks from companies like Cloudera, Facebook, Google, Huawei, IBM, InMobi, INRIA, Intel, LinkedIn, MapR, Microsoft, NTT, Pivotal , Uber, Vipshop and Yahoo.