Google donates Spdy plugin to Apache Software Foundation

Google has donated Mod_spdy, an Apache plugin that provides support for the Spdy protocol, to the open source community. The Apache Software Foundation now manages the software and wants to make the plugin standard in upcoming releases.

Google introduced the Spdy network protocol in 2009 with the aim of speeding up website loading. For this, the protocol uses compression and flow control, among other things. Encryptions are also enforced in the http alternative. After Chrome, other major browsers, such as Firefox and Internet Explorer, started supporting Spdy.

“Our goal then was to drive the growth and adoption of Spdy by making it easier for Apache 2.2 users to install and enable Spdy on their websites,” Google developer Matthew Steele blogs. According to him, many popular sites worldwide use Spdy today, including Twitter. “Now seems like the right time to stop developing Mod_spdy as a third-party add-on and instead let the plugin be a core component of the Apache httpd server.”

Google has formally donated the code to the Apache Software Foundation, which is now releasing the project as part of the httpd codebase. The intention is to make Mod_spdy fully part of Apache 2.4, as well as part of versions 2.6 and 3.0.

The influence of the Spdy protocol will only increase once the Internet Engineering Task Force releases http 2.0. The organization has been working on the new version of the http specification since 2012, taking Google’s Spdy as its starting point. The standard should be ready this year and will be rolled out alongside the already existing http 1.1, whose standard was updated early this month.