Re: White House Set To Ease Stance On Internet Smut

Robert S. Thau (rst@ai.mit.edu)
Wed, 18 Jun 1997 18:24:21 -0400 (EDT)


tbyars@earthlink.net writes:
> p.s. rst, is it true that Apache is called that because originally it
> started out to be a bunch of patches, IE: A-Patchy?

Yes. Apache 0.6.4 (if you can find a copy) really is just a bunch of
various peoples' patches applied to a stock NCSA 1.3 web server,
without fundamentally changing the look of the code. (This preceded
my massive rewrite of that patched codebase, which led, after numerous
bugfixes from other people, to the 0.8.x and 1.0.x releases).

The Apache name was originally proposed by Brian Behlendorf; he now
says (IIRC) that he had no particular punny derivation in mind for it,
but other people noticed the pun immediately, and if it wasn't for
that, it probably never would have stuck. It works better if you
complete the phrase: "A patchy server".

rst