Brian Behlendorf (born March 30, 1973) is an American technologist, executive,

computer programmer A programmer, computer programmer or coder is an author of computer source code someone with skill in computer programming. The professional titles ''software developer'' and ''software engineer'' are used for jobs that require a progr ...

and leading figure in the

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

movement. He was a primary developer of the

Apache Web server The Apache HTTP Server ( ) is a free and open-source cross-platform web server, released under the terms of Apache License 2.0. It is developed and maintained by a community of developers under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation. ...

, the most popular

web server A web server is computer software and underlying Computer hardware, hardware that accepts requests via Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, co ...

software on the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

, and a founding member of the Apache Group, which later became the

Apache Software Foundation The Apache Software Foundation ( ; ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation (classified as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States) to support a number of open-source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the ...

. Behlendorf served as president of the foundation for three years. He has served on the board of the

Mozilla Foundation The Mozilla Foundation is an American non-profit organization that exists to support and collectively lead the Open-source software, open source Mozilla project. Founded in July 2003, the organization sets the policies that govern development, ...

since 2003,

Benetech Benetech is a nonprofit social enterprise organization that empowers communities with software for social good. Previous projects include the Route 66 Literacy Project, the Miradi environmental project management software, Martus (human rights ab ...

since 2009, and the

Electronic Frontier Foundation The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an American international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1990 to promote Internet civil liberties. It provides funds for legal defense in court, ...

since 2013. Behlendorf served as the General Manager of the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) from 2021 to 2023 and is currently the Chief Technology Officer of the OpenSSF.

Career

Behlendorf, raised in Southern California, became interested in the development of the Internet while he was a student at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

, in the early 1990s. One of his first projects was an

electronic mailing list A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. Mailing lists are often rented or sold. If rented, the renter agrees to use the mailing list only at contra ...

and online music resource, SFRaves, which a friend persuaded him to start in 1992. This would soon develop into the Hyperreal.org website, an online resource devoted to

electronic music Electronic music broadly is a group of music genres that employ electronic musical instruments, circuitry-based music technology and software, or general-purpose electronics (such as personal computers) in its creation. It includes both music ...

and related subcultures. In 1993, Behlendorf, Jonathan Nelson, Matthew Nelson and Cliff Skolnick co-founded Organic, Inc., the first business dedicated to building commercial web sites. While developing the first online, for-profit, media project—the

HotWired ''Hotwired'' (1994–1999) was the first commercial online magazine, launched on October 27, 1994. Although it was part of the print magazine Wired (magazine), ''Wired'', ''Hotwired'' carried original content. History Andrew Anker, Wired ...

web site for ''

Wired Wired may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Music * ''Wired'' (Jeff Beck album), 1976 * ''Wired'' (Hugh Cornwell album), 1993 * ''Wired'' (Mallory Knox album), 2017 * "Wired", a song by Prism from their album '' Beat Street'' * "Wired ...

'' magazine—in 1994, they realized that the most commonly used web server software at the time (developed at the

National Center for Supercomputing Applications The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a unit of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and provides high-performance computing resources to researchers in the United States. NCSA is currently led by Professor Bill ...

at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) could not handle the user registration system that the company required. So, Behlendorf patched the open-source code to support HotWired's requirements. It turned out that Behlendorf wasn't the only one busy patching the NCSA code at the time, so he and Skolnick put together an electronic mailing list to coordinate the work of the other programmers. By the end of February 1995, eight core contributors to the project started Apache as a fork of the NCSA codebase. Working loosely together, they eventually rewrote the entire original program as the

Apache HTTP Server The Apache HTTP Server ( ) is a free and open-source software, free and open-source cross-platform web server, released under the terms of Apache License, Apache License 2.0. It is developed and maintained by a community of developers under the ...

. In 1999, the project incorporated as the

. Behlendorf served as president of the Foundation for three years. Behlendorf was the CTO of the

World Economic Forum The World Economic Forum (WEF) is an international non-governmental organization, international advocacy non-governmental organization and think tank, based in Cologny, Canton of Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded on 24 January 1971 by German ...

. He is also a former director and CTO of

CollabNet CollabNet VersionOne is a software company founded by Tim O’Reilly, Brian Behlendorf, and Bill Portelli, headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia, United States. CollabNet focuses on value stream management, DevOps, agile management, applicati ...

, a company he co-founded with O'Reilly & Associates (now

O'Reilly Media O'Reilly Media, Inc. (formerly O'Reilly & Associates) is an American learning company established by Tim O'Reilly that provides technical and professional skills development courses via an online learning platform. O'Reilly also publishes b ...

) in 1999 to develop tools for enabling collaborative distributed software development. CollabNet used to be the primary corporate sponsor of the open source version control system

Subversion Subversion () refers to a process by which the values and principles of a system in place are contradicted or reversed in an attempt to sabotage the established social order and its structures of Power (philosophy), power, authority, tradition, h ...

, before it became a project of the Apache Software Foundation. He continues to be involved with electronic music community events such as Chillits, and speaks often at open-source conferences worldwide. In 2003, he was named to the

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

Technology Review ''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "''The''" in its name on April 23, 1998, under then pu ...

TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35. Behlendorf has served on the board of the

since 2003,

since 2009 and the

since 2013. He was a managing director at

Peter Thiel Peter Andreas Thiel (; born 11 October 1967) is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook. According ...

's Mithril Capital, a global technology investment firm based in San Francisco, from 2014 until he joined the

Linux Foundation The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit organization established in 2000 to support Linux development and open-source software projects. Background The Linux Foundation started as Open Source Development Labs in 2000 to standardize and prom ...

. In 2016, he was appointed executive director of the open source Hyperledger project at the Linux Foundation to advance

blockchain The blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of Record (computer science), records (''blocks'') that are securely linked together via Cryptographic hash function, cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of th ...

technology. Behlendorf became the General Manager of the Open Source Security Foundation in October 2021. The appointment was shared publicly at KubeCon, along with the announcement of $10m in investments to secure open source supply chains.

References

External links

*
Organic Inc. website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Behlendorf, Brian 1973 births Living people Free software programmers Mozilla people Members of the Open Source Initiative board of directors Place of birth missing (living people) American chief technology officers UC Berkeley College of Engineering alumni Open source advocates People associated with cryptocurrency Electronic Frontier Foundation people