Brian Behlendorf

"Few people have had as broad an impact on the Web’s development as Brian Behlendorf. In 1993, while an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, Behlendorf set up wired.com, one of the earliest non-academic Web sites. In 1994 he led the team that built hotwired.com, the first ad-supported site. That same year, Behlendorf contributed to the development of the Virtual Reality Modeling Language, which added animation, music, and video to what had been a text-laden Web. But Behlendorf’s most important contribution came in 1995 when he founded the Apache Web Server Project, which sparked the proliferation of university and commercial server computers. Apache is a freely available, Unix-based Web server program that is now used to host more than 65 percent of the world’s Web sites; it is unquestionably one of the most important open-source projects in the history of computing. The Apache Software Foundation, which Behlendorf let for three years, now has 700 developers working on 120 projects to improve the Web. In 1999, Behlendorf founded CollabNet, a software firm in Brisbane, CA, that offers Web collaboration toolsl to help companies write software more efficiently."