Today at OSCON, we announced the formation of the Open Web Foundation. The Open Web Foundation (OWF) is an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies. David Recordon’s presentation announcing the formation of the OWF from the OSCON keynote can be found on SlideShare.
While we are setting up yet another foundation, we realized that we could bring projects together to avoid the duplicative costs and efforts that a lot of projects unfortunately end up investing in these foundations for the benefit of the ecosystem (especially since many of the individuals involved end up being on multiple boards). The point is to reduce the number of foundations in the long term by bringing people together.
We thought that the open source model has worked well for similar initiatives, so our structure will be similar to the Apache foundation. A main difference between OWF and Apache is that we only deal with specifications while Apache is focused on source code. The groups participating in the OWF can choose any solution to manage their source code.
The OWF is not trying to compete with existing standards bodies (IETF, W3C, OASIS, etc.). The communities we’re working with are currently coming together in a very ad-hoc fashion, and if we can help them have clean intellectual property, it makes it easier for a community to take their open specification to a standards body.
We are still in the early formation process with the OWF, but it you want to keep up with us, you can join the Open Web Foundation discussion group.
A few other posts about this announcement: