:The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization incorporated in the United States of America and was formed primarily to:
- provide a foundation for open, collaborative software development projects by supplying hardware, communication, and business infrastructure
- create an independent legal entity to which companies and individuals can donate resources and be assured that those resources will be used for the public benefit
- provide a means for individual volunteers to be sheltered from legal suits directed at the Foundation's projects
- protect the 'Apache' brand, as applied to its software products, from being abused by other organizations
Although the web server is the most well-known of the ASF projects, it is by no means the only one. Indeed, there are now products under the ASF umbrella that have little to do with the web, such as SpamAssassin.Rivet is a Tcl-related piece of software under the ASF umbrella.
[ATK] - 2015-02-13 08:43:24Hadoop is another product from the Apache Software Foundation, it's a framework for big data implemented as a distributed cluster of commodity hardware. It's based on a map and reduce principle of data on a hadoop distributed file system (hdfs). Its popularity has spawn off many modules like yarn, hive, hbase, pig to name but a few.Hadoop is one of the major player in the big data arena: http://hadoop.apache.org/#What+Is+Apache+Hadoop%3F
