Twitter has just announced that is has become an official sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation, the non-profit, decentralized collective of developers of open-source software. Twitter’s Chris Aniszczyk comments on the company’s personal stake in the sponsorship and the Apache-developed cluster manager Mesos – “Mesos runs on hundreds of production machines [within Twitter] and makes it easier to execute clustered jobs that do everything from running services to handling our analytics workload.”

Twitter made an additional statement on the matter:

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. We have a long history of contributing to Apache projects, including not only Mesos, but also Cassandra, Hadoop, Mahout, Pig and more. As Twitter grows, we look to further our commitment to the success of the ASF and other open source organizations.

Not surprisingly, Twitter also took to Twitter:

Hacker network Anonymous also chimed in to relay the news:

Apache then welcomed Twitter to its Software Foundation Sponsorship Program:

In related news, whenever I think of Apache, I think of Tommy Seebach: