We tend to think of free software as (mostly) new, so the fact that Apache celebrated its 15th birthday yesterday seems pretty extraordinary. We also typically think of free software as being the perennial plucky underdog, but as this post on the Apache Software Foundation Blog reminds us, Apache has been the leading Web server for almost its entire existence...
On Open Enterprise blog.
Happy birthday apache! But let's not forget the free NIH Image, which I have been using since 1993!
ReplyDelete@kubke: sorry, which image is that?
ReplyDeleteNIH-Image (http://rsb.info.nih.gov/nih-image/) is a software that was developed to do quantitative measures on images. It became immediately widely used in the biological community since it came out at about the same time that it became posible to move away from film cameras to digital cameras for microscopy (including confocal microscopy). The basic software was provided for free by NIH, but researchers rapidly built a collaborative group (throug mailing lists) developing macros for specific applications that were made available to NIH-Image users. The software is still used today (especially in its new incarnation ImageJ), and contributions are deposited on the site as well. It was the first free/user driven development/collaborative software I came across and continue to use it to date. The source code for ImageJ is freely available, I suspect it also was for NIH-Image.
ReplyDelete@kubke: thanks, I'd not come across that before.
ReplyDelete