Back in April 2012, the Twitter Engineering Group released a blog post in which they announced that they were going to start sponsoring the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the non-profit group that maintains the world’s most popular Open Source Web Server, Apache, as well as numerous other platforms which form a core part of Twitter’s IT operations.

The blog post makes such grand eloquent statements as:

“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.”

At the time of the announcement, Twitter didn’t specify what level of sponsorship they were going to provide, but given Twitter’s girth in the world of e-Commerce, most people would have presumed that a sizeable donation was in the offing, certainly in at least the Gold Tier of the sponsorship levels that the ASF provides for.

Not so it would seem. A quick glance at the ASF’s web page for current sponsors show the likes of Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google in the Platinum Tier, but no sign of Twitter.

To find Twitter, we have to scroll all the way down through the Gold and the Silver Tiers to the Bronze Tier, which signifies a donation of just $5,000 (!), where we finally find a reference to Twitter in amongst such Internet Star Destroyers as Two Sigma Investments and Digital Primates.

$5,000?

How many users does Twitter have again? Are things really that bad financially in the world’s largest micro-blogging website?