14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter has started supporting the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and became a bronze sponsor. Twitter uses plenty of open-source tools, many of them fostered by Apache, among them Mesos, an ASF Incubator project.
"Open source is a pervasive part of our culture. Many projects at Twitter rely on open source technologies, and as we evolve as a company, our commitment to open source continues to increase," Twitter wrote.
"Today, we are becoming an official sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), a non-profit and volunteer-run open source foundation," it announced.
Most web companies rely heavily on open-source software for a number of reasons, the fact that it's free and well documented, for one.
Twitter owes much of its growth to open-source tools as does Facebook and others before it, including Google, though the web giant now mostly relies in tools developed internally.
Twitter wanted to give back to the Apache Software Foundation to ensure that the tools it uses and others are taken care of.
"Within Twitter, Mesos runs on hundreds of production machines and makes it easier to execute clustered jobs that do everything from running services to handling our analytics workload," Twitter explained.
"Sponsoring the ASF is not only the right thing to do, it will help us sustain our existing projects at the ASF by supporting the foundation’s infrastructure," it added.
Twitter signed on to be a bronze sponsor, which means it contributes about $5,000, €3,800 per year to the ASF. That's not a great amount of money, even for a company that doesn't generate a whole lot of revenue.
Twitter is worth several billion dollars and spends a lot more than that on the lowest paid engineer per month. Even Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress, is a silver sponsor, paying $20,000, €15,240 per year out of his own pocket. Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and Citrix are platinum sponsors paying $100,000, €76,200 per year.