Twitter announced on Thursday that it would join the ranks of Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo as sponsors of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

The ASF is a non-profit collective that supports open source projects. It has been active since 1999, and has gained support among developer communities in a variety of industries.

Twitter announced that it would be supporting the ASF in a tweet (of course) as well as a blog post on their Engineering website.

Starting today, we are sponsoring The Apache Foundation. We look forward to contributing more and increasing our commitment to @TheASF

— Twitter Open Source (@TwitterOSS) April 19, 2012

Twitter explained that their support of the organization came about because of their increasing commitment to open source, and because the ASF supports a number of open source projects that Twitter itself uses and contributes to. They singled out Mesos as an ASF project that they are currently using.

Twitter open source representative Chris Aniszczyk went on to give further details about the company’s official support of the ASF:

“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.”

And, the support of the ASF was apparently something that Anonymous could get behind. The hacker group tweeted the story on their official Twitter account shortly after Twitter’s announcement:

Twitter signs up to sponsor open source Apache Software Foundation | bit.ly/HR1wZy

— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) April 20, 2012