Tomorrow (December 4 at 14:45 CET) Apache Software Foundation member and former Director Isabel Drost-Fromm will speak before the German Bundestag’s Committee on Digital Affairs as an expert in her own capacity at a hearing on the topic of open source.
The following provides an overview of the prepared written testimony Drost-Fromm submitted in advance of the hearing. For those interested in listening to Drost-Fromm’s discussion, and other EU experts in open source, the hearing will be live streamed in German.
According to analyses by the EU, 80% of all software products developed in the EU contain open source software. As one of the largest and oldest foundations, the Apache Software Foundation contributes a very large proportion to this software.
The Apache Software Foundation was founded in 1999 as a 501(c)(3) in the US, and today has 1,105 members and 8,400 committers working across more than 320 projects. In addition, there are over 10,000 contributors who support the core teams of the projects. These projects include currently well-known projects such as Apache Airflow, Apache Cassandra, Apache IoTDB, Apache Kafka, and Apache Superset, – as well as projects that have been supporting developers for decades, such as Apache HTTPd and Apache Tomcat..
One of the strengths of open source is the availability of the source code: not just using it, but the ability to actively change it yourself, adapting it to meet your own needs. The second strength lies in collaboration. In 2006, Apache Hadoop was created asa small sub-project that implemented Google’s Map Reduce approach to data analysis on large computing clusters. Even after Yahoo! hired one of the core developers, Hadoop remained open for further development as an open source project. The project was soon supported by a social media start-up and a business network start-up – today known worldwide under the names Meta and LinkedIn.
In 2008 Drost-Fromm co-founded a machine-learning project with Apache Mahout, based on Hadoop, which for years powered Zalando’s recommendation system when the company was still an emerging e-commerce startup in Berlin.. Although the recommendation system has since been replaced by Zalando, its product search continues to rely on Apache Lucene—technology that now underpins numerous operations at Amazon as well.
This collaborative approach to building technical infrastructure plays a pivotal role in driving rapid innovation, even for global enterprises. However open source projects also face limitations. For example, when addressing security vulnerabilities, work is often conducted privately to prevent giving potential attackers an edge. Additionally, strict governance rules and moderation are essential to safeguard against harmful influences and ensure contributions remain constructive.
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