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Apache Comes With Too Much Community Overhead?
drizzle writes "There's an interesting story on the Apache Marketing blog about whether or not Apache projects come with too much overhead, especially compared with other services or a roll-your-own approach. The article states, 'It's true that compared with SourceForge, Apache has a more rigorous management structure. The ASF has formalized processes and procedures that we believe represent best practices governance. All new projects must pass through an incubation period to ensure that all of the project's members have internalized these processes. However, each project's leadership has a tremendous amount of discretion in managing within this framework.' There is also a follow up article written by one of the httpd developers about 'What Apache brings to the table.' The article cites community, experience, legal framework, diversity, brand strength, and networking as reasons why developers and companies should consider bringing their projects over to Apache."
If you want simple, static content, thttpd is stupidly tiny, stupidly scalable, and way faster than Apache. Unfortunately it uses the old fork model for dealing with CGI scripts which make it quite slow as doing that (but no worse than the old NCSA httpd). It has a number of interesting features, such as per-filetype bandwidth throttling (so you can specify that MP3 files only get transferred at 10kB/sec), but also has some suprising omissions --- the MIME type database is hard-coded, and it only handles HTTP 1.1. But if you have a simple site based mainly around static pages, thttpd is probably ideal for your purposes.
Or if you want something smaller than Apache and a little more than just static pages try http://www.lighttpd.net/. It is secure and beats Apache 2 performance wise and the configuration takes only a few minutes. It runs on my small server for months now and is certainly worth a look.
Ok, whilst on free OS logo fetishes.
The Red Hat model.
http://www.madyiordache.com/TheRedHat.htm
I'd think at least twice before criticizing Apache's basic structure. There aren't many open source projects that are as successful as Apache and dominate their space as thoroughly.