Community-led development "The Apache Way"
The pages of the Apache History Project capture some of the history of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), starting from its first and arguably most important software project, the Apache™ HTTP Web Server project - the web server often simply called "Apache".
From the humble beginnings of fewer than a dozen software engineers sharing code patches via email in February of 1995, to the incorporation of the ASF in June of 1999, to the years of slow growth as the concept of open source percolated into the everyday vernacular, to the ASF of today with over 300+ projects spanning the technology spectrum, the history of the ASF is really about the growth of its communities.
We hope to better capture this history before bitrot and aging memories lose the earliest days of how the ASF and The Apache Way came to be. Apache is important not only as an excellent piece of software, but as an example of how free, community-driven software development is supposed to work. These history pages highlight important historical events and important philosophical decisions made over the years which have made Apache successful.
We could use your help! As always, patches are welcome! The best place to get involved is with the Community Development project if you're interested in helping. They have a public mailing list for community discussions available to all.
Since all Apache project development happens on publicly-archived mailing lists, and since all Apache project code is in source control (SVN or git), all the raw data of activities of Apache projects are available to view.
For source code, there are various sites to visualize the changes, which include virtually all Apache source code:
Similarly, mailing lists used by projects are all archived: