Mr. Ken Coar

A software developer and open development evangelist, he recognized primarily for his participation in the creation of The Apache Software Foundation, and the inception of the initial ApacheCon user conferences. He has been active in open software projects, and lectures internationally about open development methodologies and distributed collaboration. He has addressed local groups, regional conferences, and government organizations. He attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst, majoring in computer topics, but left before completing a degree. He worked for the University for several years, and has since been employed by General Dynamics, Digital Equipment Corporation, Process Software Corporation, and IBM. In April 2011 he joined Red Hat as a Principal Application Software Engineer. Red Hat is an American multinational software company providing open-source software products to the enterprise community, and is located in Raleigh, North Carolina, with satellite offices worldwide. A member of The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), he was a Director on its Board from its incorporation in 1999 through June 2007. His involvement with the organization dates back to late 1996, and his major code contributions have been to the Apache HTTP server project. He is also the primary contributor to the Apache Pulse project, which provides daily analyses of all of the Apache mailing lists. He was Vice President and Chair of the Apache Conferences project from 1998 to 2007 and was responsible for the ApacheCon shows which have been held in North America and Europe since 2000. He was the initial Chair of the Apache Commons project, which eventually shut down without actually having accomplished much; it was later successfully re-started and is currently a viable project. He helped in the creation of the Apache Incubator project. He encouraged the creation of the docs subproject of the Apache Web Server project, thereby drawing attention to documentation as a critical part of the project which should be granted the same degree of respect as writing code. In October 2005 the ASF board appointed him to be the Vice President and chair of the Apache Geronimo Application Server project in an attempt to repair the community dynamics. He voluntarily resigned one year later, returning the now-healthy project to self-governance. A complete and current listing of Apache projects in which he is involved is available at http://people.apache.org/committer-index.html. In 2004 he was invited to join the board of the Open Source Initiative, and served as a Director until April 1, 2010, when he resigned. He was instrumental in improving internal organization, expanding the Board's composition internationally, and extending the OSI bylaws to allow for the creation of new initiatives. He was involved in expanding OSI's activities beyond software license certification, and in turning the organization into a grass roots membership structure. He has made minor contributions to other projects, such as the PHP scripting language, the Habari blogging package, and a couple of Ruby gems. In the late 1990s he was involved in IBM's efforts to get involved with the Apache HTTP Server project, and was instrumental in the development of a working relationship between the two. He is also casually involved with a few projects at SourceForge. He is co-author with David R. Robinson of RFC 3875, the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) specification. In addition, he is the author of 'Apache Server for Dummies,' (1999) ISBN 0-7645-0291-3; co-author of RFC 3875, 'Apache Server Unleashed,' (2000) ISBN 0-672-31808-3; and 'Apache Cookbook', 1st edition (2003) ISBN 0-596-00191-6, 2nd edition (2008) ISBN 0-596-52994-5; ?The Sun Never Sets on Distributed Development? ACM Queue, Volume 1, No. 9; ?Secure Apache: Out, Damned Bot!? (2008) Enterprise IT Planet; ?Apache Software Foundation Member Ken Coar Interview? (1999) [Linux Today]; and ?Coar on Apache Site Defacement? (2000) [Wired News]. He has written articles for a number of publications including Linux Magazine, ACM Queue, Linux Today, PHPBuilder, EnterpriseIT Planet, and Apache Today. He currently lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.