It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Go Daddy has reaped huge benefits from open-source software. We have thousands of servers running Linux (mostly CentOS), MySQL, Apache, OpenSSL, and lots of other free software. These systems handle about 10 billion DNS requests per day and power the fastest growing SSL Certification Authority in the world.
For years, we’ve given back to the community by offering free SSL certificates. More recently, we’ve contributed code, such as the WordPress P3 plugin. Now, we’ve gone a step further: our Hosting team recently contributed $20K to the Apache Software Foundation. We selected Apache because we rely so heavily on their catalog of software — Cassandra, Hadoop, and (obviously) HTTP Server, to name a few.
We’ll be identifying other open-source organizations to which we’d like to make a donation in the months ahead. And, we realize that it’s not just about the money. So, we’re also ramping-up our contributions of code. We believe open-source projects represent an important piece of the tech ecosystem. They’ve helped us and we are happy to be giving back.
This is great that we are giving back to the community! I hope to see this trend continue at GoDaddy, and would love to see us contribute to additional open source projects!
It would be good to see a donation to the OpenSSH/OpenBSD project for SSH seems to be the tool that so many use to manage systems but as it is used so often without even thinking about it, it gets forgot within the world of the other front and center projects.
@ Jason, Go Daddy did donate $10k to OpenSSH in 2006 and it is possible that they may be under consideration for another donation in this more recent philanthropic effort for the open source community.
Excellent news Wayne. It’s good to know that GoDaddy is contributing with the Open Source Community. Kudos!