We have been working on Apache Friends and XAMPP for over 10 years now. We still have a lot of ideas on how to continue to improve it, but as the project grows it has become harder to find the time and resources needed to implement a lot of them. We have joined forces with BitNami to continue to improve XAMPP. BitNami provides a free library of web applications that can be installed anywhere. They are big open source supporters, have a lot of experience packaging Apache and we believe they will do a great job of improving BitNami moving forward. Please see below for some words from BitNami co-founder Daniel Lopez

Dear XAMPP users,

At BitNami, we have been great admirers of XAMPP and what it has accomplished: making it easier for programmers everywhere to quickly setup and run their own local web development environments. We had a similar goal of making web apps easier to install anywhere, whether in your laptop or in the cloud. When Kay and Kai suggested a few months ago the possibility of joining forces with them to take over maintenance of XAMPP, it was an easy decision for us. Over the next weeks and months we will be working to continue to improve XAMPP. A big chunk of our expertise is in crossplatform installation and apps. Among other things we plan to:

- Improve the existing installers
- Improve the bundled Control Panel
- Make it easy to install and develop with Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress, etc. on XAMPP
- Improve 64bit support, PostgreSQL, additional languages (i.e. Python)
- Improved Linux and OS X support
- Improve the website look and feel

As a first step, we have made BitNami for XAMPP, a one-click installer that will allow you to install Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress on top of your existing XAMPP installation.

http://bitnami.org/xampp

As newcomers, we are looking to the XAMPP community to help us with the transition by providing us with feedback and ideas on how to continue to improve XAMPP. Please use the XAMPP forums or feel free to email me directly at daniel@bitnami.org with any suggestions or comments.

Daniel Lopez, BitNami co-founder