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The Apache® Software Foundation Recognizes Apache Innovations Integral to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Panama Papers InvestigationForest Hill, MD, April 17, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today the role played by several Apache projects in the investigation of the Panama Papers. At 2.6 terabytes of data, the Panama Papers is the largest leak of all time, comprising 11.5M financial and legal records sent from an anonymous source. The journalistic cooperation involved more than 400 journalists from 100 publications on six continents over the course of a year. The discovery exposed a complex system of criminal and corrupt activities secretly hidden by offshore concerns. The investigation recently received a Pulitzer Prize in the Explanatory Reporting category. "The Apache Software Foundation incorporated 18 years ago with the mission to create software for the public good," said ASF President Sam Ruby. "We are honored that Apache software played a critical role with the Panama Papers, and congratulate the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and their media partners on this prestigious award." The discovery, exchange, and management of information that involved 214,488 entities was made possible by:
In addition to Apache software, a number of other Open Source projects were also integral to the investigation. Tis includes Tesseract-ocr (whose optical character recognition engine was used for capturing text from images), Project Blacklight (used as a discovery interface), and Jackcess (used for reading and writing MS Access databases): three examples of the millions of software solutions distributed under the Apache License v2.0, that allows for their free use, modification, and sharing. Apache Open Source Projects Programmers, solutions architects, individual users, educators, researchers, corporations, governments, and enthusiasts worldwide depend on Apache software for development tools, libraries, frameworks, visualizers, end-user productivity solutions, and more. 75% of Apache's 150M lines of code have been developed over 65,000 person years, and are valued at US$7B. The ASF serves approximately 9M source code downloads from Apache mirrors on a yearly basis, excluding convenience binaries. Worldwide dependency on Apache software continues to grow, with Web requests received from every Internet-connected country on the planet. The Apache Incubator is home to 63 projects undergoing development, with emerging innovations Big Data, communication protocols, connected devices, cryptography, data science/machine learning/analytics, development frameworks, microfinances, remote desktop access, serverless computing, and more. All Apache products are available to the public-at-large completely free of charge. All software development and project leadership is done entirely by volunteers. As a not-for-profit charitable organization, the ASF is funded through tax-deductible contributions from corporations, foundations, and private individuals. Approximately 75% of the ASF's US$1.2M annual budget is dedicated to running critical infrastructure support services that keep Apache services running 24x7x365 at near 100% uptime on an annual budget of less than US$5,000 per project. About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) © The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Apache Commons", "PDF Box", "Apache PDF Box", "POI", "Apache POI", "Solr", "Apache Solr", "Tika", "Apache Tika", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners. # # # Sally Khudairi Vice President The Apache Software Foundation +1 617 921 8656 [email protected] |