The origin of the name Apache web server

I read a lot. Not much literature and novels as unfortunately those seem to suffer under my more professional reading habits. I read lots of technical articles, white papers, blog posts and specifications. It's part of what I do to keep up to date with the things happening in the CS field. But in part I also read all kinds of stuff to gain a broader understanding of our profession.

Some of the longer things I read this year include "PPK on JavaScript", "The no asshole rule", but also the venerable "Art and science of Smalltalk". And some colleagues even caught me reading an OS9 AppleScript manual dated somewhere around 1999. They're still making fun of their discovery almost every day, but I don't mind... having read that manual has given me a better understanding of how the now much heralded Apple engineers thought about making an end-user programming language almost a decade ago.

Recently I read the bulk of Roy Thomas Fielding's thesis Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures in which he introduces the principles of REST. As with any thesis it is a bit too abstract for my taste, but it did introduce me somewhat better to the background and theory behind REST.

Aside from that, I made one stunning discover when I read about Fielding's involvement in the creation of the Apache HTTP server:

• At the time, the most popular HTTP server (httpd) was the public domain software developed by Rob McCool at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (NCSA). However, development had stalled after Rob left NCSA in mid-1994, and many webmasters had developed their own extensions and bug fixes that were in need of a common distribution. A group of us created a mailing list for the purpose of coordinating our changes as "patches" to the original source. In the process, we created the Apache HTTP Server Project

Please read that last part again, and again... and again. Until it hits you where it finally hit me. What hit me? Well... I finally understood that the name of the Apache web server might (originally) have had nothing to do with the Apache tribe. The server was created by taking an existing code base and then applying all sort of patches. So in a sense it was a patchy web server. A patchy... Apache...!

Brilliant! In all my years of knowing the Apache web server and the brand that was created around the Apache name, I never realized where it came from.

The Apache website itself has this to say about it:

• The name 'Apache' was chosen from respect for the Native American Indian tribe of Apache, well-known for their superior skills in warfare strategy and their inexhaustible endurance. It also makes a cute pun on "a patchy web server" -- a server made from a series of patches -- but this was not its origin.

For the moment I'll take their word for it and accept that the name sounding like "a patchy web server" is pure coincidence. I bet it's also more convenient for them in selling the Apache brand: "we named our web server after its inexhaustible endurance" sounds a lot better than "we named our web server after the fact that it was created from a bunch of unrelated patches".