The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is a well-known nonprofit organization in the field of information technology. Ever since its inception back in 1999, the ASF has been heavily involved in supporting open source projects for things like legal, organizational, and technical infrastructure.
They are behind projects like Hadoop, HTTP Server, Iceberg, Cassandra, Kafka, and many more, leading open source into exciting new territories while nurturing a diverse global community that works together on solving real-world problems.
Since 2020, David Nalley has served as the President of the ASF, working on streamlining processes and forming partnerships with governments and open source organizations around the world.
Ruth Suehle has been appointed as the new president of the ASF. She is an experienced professional who has had stints at various organizations, with her longest one being at Red Hat (15 years).
She has served as ASF's Executive Vice President since 2020 and has been instrumental in organizing the Community Over Code event (formerly known as ApacheCon) since 2018. Not only that, but she is also the Director of Open Source at SAS since 2022.
During the announcement, Ruth added:
I am honored to serve as the ASF’s new president and am appreciative of David’s service. In the time since the ASF was founded, open source software has gone from being a niche concept to a critical underpinning of nearly all modern software development.
Due to this success, our industry is undergoing fundamental changes that will have ripple effects on the entire ecosystem from vendors to users. It’s an extremely interesting time in the history of software, and I’m excited to help lead the ASF into that future.
Overall, it is good to see a change in management, as this usually shows that an organization is confident enough to undergo such major changes without being affected adversely, that too in a time of global turmoil.
You can know more about what Ruth intends to do in her new role at the ASF in her blog.
💬 Your thoughts on this move? For me, I am interested to see how the ASF progresses under new leadership in the coming years.
Ankush Das
