A team representing Indigenous people today in technologies is calling on the Apache Software Basis to alter its name, centered in part on the foundation’s code of perform.
Nonprofit team Natives in Tech writes in a site write-up that while numerous companies have appropriated indigenous culture, “none of them are as significant, prestigious, or perfectly-regarded as The Apache Software package Foundation is in software package circles.” The organization can take difficulty with Apache co-creator Brian Behlendorf’s explanation for why he instructed the title and its “Spaghetti Western” tropes, as properly as the Foundation’s feather brand and its mentioned “reverence and appreciation” for a singular, broadly described “Apache” identification.
In the 2020 self-sponsored documentary “Trillions and Trillions Served,” Behlendorf suggests he sought a name much more evocative than “New HTTPd” or the “Cyber-this or Spider-that” nomenclature that was popular at the time:
I was like, possibly a thing a minimal little bit much more exciting, a very little little bit a lot more passionate, and—not to be a cultural appropriator or something like that—but I’d just observed a documentary about Geronimo and variety of the previous days of the Indigenous American tribe referred to as the Apaches, appropriate? Who succumbed to the invasion from the West, from the United States, and they were being the last tribe to give up their territory.
And for me, that pretty much romantically represented what I felt we ended up doing with this web server task, which was, at the time, Microsoft owned 95 p.c of the desktops all they had to do was occur up with a browser and a server, and if they owned each backlinks, it was form of game about.
In a submit authored by Adam Recvlohe, Holly Grimm, and Desiree Kane, Natives in Tech wrote that Behlendorf’s “frankly outdated spaghetti-Western ‘romantic’ presentation of a living and lively local community as dead and long gone in buy create a engineering organization ‘for the bigger good’ is as ignorant as it is offensive.” The team calls on the Basis to “choose the essential techniques needed to specific the ally-ship they advertise so deeply on their website” and, in holding with the Foundation’s code of carry out, “be cautious in the phrases [they] pick” in any identify change.
The Basis emailed a statement to The Sign up in response to the nonprofit’s get in touch with for renaming. A spokesperson wrote that the Foundation has listened to the concerns and is listening. “As a nonprofit operate by volunteers, improvements will will need time to be cautiously weighed with customers, the board, and our lawful group. Our users are checking out alternative techniques to handle it, but we never have anything to share at this time,” the spokesperson wrote.
A variety of world-wide-web resources from the time of the Apache project’s founding, now located largely by the Net Archive (and compiled on Wikipedia), counsel at least a concurrent considering for the title: Its internet server started as a sequence of patches to the NCSA HTTPd server. In April 2000, Behlendorf told Linux Journal that other people in the business assumed the identify was a pun on “a patchy website server.” But Behlendorf insisted the pun wasn’t his intent. “It just form of connoted: ‘Take no prisoners. Be form of aggressive and kick some ass,'” he said.
The concept of the Apache as a singular, extinct tribe, 1 that set up a noteworthy fight in the experience of a conquering aggressor, is at the main of Natives in Tech’s grievance. The group notes that there are eight federally acknowledged tribes with “Apache” in their name, representing “1000’s and countless numbers of dwelling, respiratory men and women.” Notably, a stereotypical “pure, reverent, and easy” depiction (i.e., a “noble savage“) “distances Indigenous persons from fashionable technological know-how, the really detail the [Apache] basis signifies,” Natives in Tech writes.
Reconsideration of Indigenous-derived names has been underway for some time, with additional momentum in new yrs. Previous yr, the Cherokee Nation questioned Jeep to change the title of its Cherokee and Grand Cherokee SUVs. Professional sports activities teams in Cleveland and Washington, DC, have undergone name and brand variations a short while ago soon after a long time of resistance.
