Community Over Code: Ruth Suehle on Leading The Apache Software Foundation into the Future
“Open communication, consensus, and collaboration are the heart of The Apache Way and always have been. That’s why you hear us say “community over code.”
Foundation Mission & Leadership
Q1. As President of The Apache Software Foundation, you’re leading one of the world’s most influential open-source organizations at a particularly dynamic moment in technology history. Can you share your vision for ASF’s mission today and how it has evolved? What does “The Apache Way”—the foundation’s collaborative, consensus-driven approach to software development—mean in 2025, and why do you believe this methodology remains vital as the software landscape becomes increasingly complex and commercially driven?
Ruth Suehle: The ASF has been around for more than 25 years, which has given us a lot of time with developing software collaboratively, and plenty of lessons learned along the way. The Apache Way is the name for our time-tested approach to open source development, but it’s not a set of policies or demands. We have hundreds of projects, each with their own culture, activities, and stage of development. As a whole, however, the ASF’s long-held belief is that open source software thrives best when it remains independent of any single or dominant commercial interests. The Apache Way gives all of those diverse projects a framework for maintaining neutrality and independence. This ensures that our projects serve the broader community.
It’s built around a few concepts, the first of which leads the rest, and that is earned authority. The ASF is built on a web of trust and publicly earned merit, which does not expire. The community is entirely volunteer-based (though of course many are paid by companies to work on projects housed at The ASF, as they are for any code-producing foundation), and votes are all equal.
Open communication, consensus, and collaboration are the heart of The Apache Way and always have been. That’s why you hear us say “community over code.” A strong and healthy community comes first, because a good community can fix bad code, but good code can’t heal a struggling community.
Q2. The Apache Software Foundation oversees hundreds of projects spanning everything from web servers to big data platforms to AI/ML frameworks. Looking across this diverse portfolio, what are the common threads or emerging patterns you’re seeing? Are there specific technical domains or project types where you’re seeing the most energy, innovation, or community growth? And conversely, are there areas where ASF projects face particular sustainability or relevance challenges?
Ruth Suehle: We actually map projects by category at projects.apache.org, so anyone is welcome to take a look and see where things lie today. What you mostly won’t see reflected there, however, are our projects in the Incubator, which is how new projects come into the foundation. The newest things there at any given time are likely to be reflections of broader trends in technology, and right now the latest additions are largely data-related.
It’s worth noting the other end of the lifecycle, as well: the Apache Attic. This is how we officially retire and archive projects, and it’s an important feature for the foundation and how we support a full project lifecycle. By ensuring transparency and providing a formal process for projects that are no longer under active development,the Attic acts as a historical archive, moving projects to a read-only state to preserve their code and documentation for users, while ceasing new development and providing limited oversight to allow for future maintenance if needed.
As for sustainability, I see this not as an ASF challenge or that of a particular project, but as a difficulty facing the entire open source ecosystem right now. I’ve given talks and led panels at a few events in the last year on the subject. It was a significant topic at this year’s Open Source Congress. When you say “sustainability,” people tend to hear “funding,” and that is an important factor, but it’s more complicated than just money. That said, complying with coming regulatory changes, notably the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), is going to impose significant additional costs on open source projects and foundations. This year we launched our Tooling Initiative to address those concerns, and it’s the first of our ASF Initiatives, which offer targeted sponsorships for specific needs.
Current Projects & Strategic Directions
Q3. Apache has been foundational to the big data revolution with projects like Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, and Flink. As we move into the GenAI era, how are these established projects evolving to serve new workloads and use cases? Are you seeing Apache projects positioning themselves as critical infrastructure for AI applications—for instance, in data pipelines feeding LLMs, vector databases, or real-time inference systems? What role do you envision Apache projects playing in the broader AI infrastructure stack?
Ruth Suehle: Apache projects are not just evolving for the GenAI era—they are actively positioning themselves as critical infrastructure for AI applications, particularly in the domain of data pipelines, real-time context, and orchestration. The shift is from “batch big data” to “real-time, contextualized data streams” that feed LLMs and power real-time inference.
As you state, existing ASF projects are already well-positioned to plug right into the AI ecosystem. Apache Kafka can act as a mission-critical data fabric for generative AI applications, while Apache Flink’s focus on stateful, low-latency, and event-time stream processing is ideal for AI workflows. Apache Spark, Apache Airflow, and Apache Beam all fit well as tools to manage tasks like large-scale data preparation, workflow orchestration, and data abstraction. Two years ago, Apache Pinot added support for real-time vector ingestion in 2023 to enable similarity search as a real-time operation, addressing the need for immediate updates in generative AI pipelines. So Apache projects are not just migrating their existing functionality; they are fundamentally being adapted to own the data layer within AI infrastructure stacks.
Q4. Beyond the well-known flagship projects, what are some emerging or underappreciated Apache projects that you’re particularly excited about? Are there incubating projects or recent graduates from the Apache Incubator that you believe represent important directions for the foundation? What makes these projects significant, and what do they tell us about where the Apache community sees future opportunities?
Ruth Suehle: I can’t even pick favorite songs and movies, much less favorite projects! But seriously, this question is more like picking which of your children you think is the most promising. A huge part of our underlying ethos and governance at the ASF is supporting all projects equally and encouraging all of our projects to be as successful as possible. Their independence and unique communities, coupled with the incredible innovation we tend to see across all open source projects, means that any of our Incubator projects have the potential to bring significant innovation and advancement in their areas.
Q5. As President, what specific directions would you personally like to move The Apache Software Foundation forward? Are there strategic initiatives—whether technical, organizational, or community-focused—that you’re championing? This could range from attracting new types of projects, expanding global community participation, improving project sustainability models, or addressing gaps in the open-source ecosystem that ASF is uniquely positioned to fill.
Ruth Suehle: I mentioned earlier that when people hear “sustainability,” they often hear “money,” but it means other things as well. Fundamentally, sustainability is “what do we need to do to ensure the success of the open source ecosystem for decades to come?” One of the biggest changes I’ve seen in the last two or three years is a highly beneficial one, and that is a move towards more collaboration across the foundations, industry, and project communities. These groups have spent many years working largely as silos, which was fine when the work was all about individual software projects, but we’re facing more and more issues that are best solved by doing the thing that we all know best–collaboration. For The ASF, participating in groups like the Eclipse Foundation’s Open Regulatory Compliance Working Group, in our role as Open Source Initiative Affiliate members, and through partnerships like we have with Alpha-Omega help us reach solutions to common problems the open source way instead of constantly reinventing the wheel. Earlier this year, I was elected to the OSI board to represent the OSI’s Affiliate members, and I think the OSI’s work to bring together organizations through the Affiliate program and things like the Open Policy Alliance are great examples of this kind of cooperation that is not only the way forward for the entire ecosystem, but critical to continued success.
Another important piece of change we need for sustainability is doing a better job of growing a talent pipeline in open source. “Open source” got a lot of mainstream press for about 3 years after the term was coined in 1998, and then we all rather quietly built this massive ecosystem, again largely in silos. In 2025, that code is quite literally running the world, and there’s a lot more of it than there used to be. There are larger needs around it than there used to be. But the pool of maintainers has not grown at the same rate, and one place I think we really failed in all of open source is making sure we were bringing in new talent to keep up with the pace that we were creating at. We have plenty of room for improvement in preparing the next generation, and we have to keep building our people.
Simply put, we have a mentorship problem. I believe a large reason for that is that those who built open source software in the early years were doing exactly that–building from scratch. They may have had mentors in writing code, but they didn’t have mentors in open source, because they were writing the playbook as they went. As a result, they also didn’t have mentors in mentoring, i.e., a model to look to when mentoring the next generation of open source contributors.There are still a lot of folks around who have been here since roughly 1998, when the term “open source” was coined, or shortly thereafter. I don’t like the math, but the fact is that those people are retiring (or at least might like to one day!), and when I look around the room at events and on mailing lists, I’m not seeing enough new faces to keep up.
Future Vision & Community
Q6. Looking ahead three to five years, what does success look like for The Apache Software Foundation under your leadership? How do you want the foundation to be positioned relative to the major technological shifts we’re experiencing—not just GenAI, but also cloud-native architectures, edge computing, quantum computing, and emerging regulatory frameworks around software supply chain security and AI governance? What legacy or impact do you hope to achieve during your time as President, and what would you say to technologists, organizations, or students who are considering getting involved with Apache projects or The Apache Way of building software?
Ruth Suehle: There are a few important things coming in the next few years, and none of them are about specific technologies. New technologies are exciting, of course, but part of the reason they’re exciting is because they come and go. So the best thing we can do as a foundation is provide a solid structure for any project to build a community and a healthy open source project. We also need to keep making the technical improvements that will help them and their users, like the work we’re doing to build a foundation-wide release process and tooling infrastructure that enable ASF projects and incoming Incubator projects to fully comply with not only with the CRA, but all of the new regulations developing around the world.
If it’s not already obvious, the best thing I think The ASF can do, and the best way I can help is president, is to set an example for how to build good communities, both within our own foundation and in our collaboration with others. And the best thing that anyone who cares about the future of open source can do right this minute is not writing more code (which we’ll keep doing anyway), but to go find another person and turn them into a contributor, keeping in mind that the ecosystem is now vast and needs a lot more variety of skills than just writing code. For my part, I am always happy to share what I know, because hoarding knowledge helps no one. I frequently end talks by telling people if there’s anything I know that can help you, whether that’s finding ways to contribute, learning about how to bring your project into The ASF, starting an OSPO, or even making stellar baked goods, please reach out, and that goes for any reader here. Community over code thrives with each one of us building a little more community (and baked goods certainly never hurt!).
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Ruth Suehle is the director of the open source program office at SAS, an analytics, data management, and AI software company. She is also president of the Apache Software Foundation and a member of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) board of directors. Ruth has helped build open source communities for nearly two decades, much of which she spent in the Open Source Program Office at Red Hat. Co-author of Raspberry Pi Hacks (O’Reilly, December 2013) and previously editor of Red Hat Magazine and opensource.com, Ruth is a writer and core contributor at GeekMom.com.
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