Organization:List of free and open-source software organizations

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The following are notable organizations devoted to the advocacy, legal aid, financial aid, technical aid, governance, etc. of free and open-source software (FOSS) as a whole, or of one or more specific FOSS projects. For projects that have their own foundation or are part of an umbrella organization, the primary goal is often to provide a mechanism for funding development of the software.

For the most part, these organizations are structured as nonprofit/charity organizations.

This list does not include companies that aim to make money from free and open-source software.

Location-specific

Africa

  • Ma3bar – a United Nations-affiliated organization that promotes open source software within the Arab world.

Asia

Australia

  • Open Source Industry Australia – founded in 2004; promotes open source in Australia, as well as the use of Australian open source software and services around the world.

Europe

North America

  • Free Software Foundation (FSF) – founded in 1985; began as a development center for the GNU Project. It currently advocates for free software and against proprietary software and formats; and maintains and legally enforces the GNU General Public License. It also created the Free Software Definition.
  • Open Source Initiative (OSI) – founded in 1998; promotes open source software from a pragmatic rather than moral perspective. Also created the Open Source Definition.
  • Open Source for America (OSFA) – a consortium of organizations advocating for the use of FOSS in the United States.
    • Mil-OSS – founded in 2009; promotes the use of open-source software in the United States Department of Defense.
  • Open Source Software Institute (OSSI) – founded in 2000; promotes the use of open-source software in the United States within government, at all levels.
  • Fairfield Programming Association (FPA) – founded in 2020; focused on education and creating open-source software as learning resources.

South America

Oceania

Umbrella organizations

The following organizations host, and provide other services, for a variety of different open-source projects:

  • Apache Software Foundation (ASF) – founded in 1999 with headquarters in Wakefield, MA, USA; manages the development of over 350 Apache software projects, including the Apache HTTP Server.[1]
  • Eclipse Foundation – founded in 2004 with headquarters in Ottawa, ON, Canada; supports the development of over 350 Eclipse projects, including the Eclipse IDE.
  • Free Software Foundation (FSF) – founded in 1985 with headquarters in Boston, MA, USA; supports the free software movement, which promotes the universal freedom to study, distribute, create, and modify computer software
  • GNOME Foundation – founded in 2000 with headquarters in Orinda, CA, USA; coordinates the efforts of the GNOME Project, including GNOME
  • KDE e.V. – founded in 1997 with headquarters in Berlin, Germany; coordinates the efforts of KDE Projects including KDE
  • Linux Foundation (LF) – founded in 2000 with headquarters in San Francisco, CA, USA; supports the development of the Linux kernel, as well as over 60 other projects, only some of which are connected to Linux. Also does advocacy, training and standards.
    • Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) – founded in 2015, to promote containers. It was announced with Kubernetes 1.0, an open source container cluster manager, which was contributed to the foundation by Google as a seed technology.
  • OASIS Open - founded in 1993; provides communities with foundation-level support, IP and license management, governance, and outreach with an optional path for work to be recognized by de jure standards organizations and referenced in public procurement.
  • OpenInfra Foundation – founded in 2012 with headquarters in Austin, TX; focused on the development and support of open source infrastructure projects, including OpenStack. Previously known as the OpenStack Foundation.
  • OW2 – founded in 2007 with headquarters in Paris, France; focused on infrastructure for enterprise middleware
  • Open Source Initiative (OSI) – founded in 1998 with headquarters in Palo Alto, CA, USA; steward of the Open Source Definition, the set of rules that define open source software
  • Sahana Software Foundation – founded in 2009 with headquarters in Los Angeles, CA, USA; for humanitarian-related software
  • Software Freedom Conservancy – founded in 2006 with headquarters in New York, NY, USA; hosts around 40 projects.
  • Software in the Public Interest (SPI) – founded in 1997 with headquarters in New York, NY, USA; originally only for the Debian project, it now hosts around 35 projects, some of which are umbrella projects themselves.
  • VideoLAN – founded in 2009 with headquarters in Paris, France; multimedia-related projects

Domain-specific organizations

The following organizations host open-source projects that relate to a specific technical area.

Project-specific organizations

A large number of single-project organizations (often called "foundations") exist; in most cases, their primary purpose is to provide a mechanism to bring funds from the software's users, including both individuals and companies, to its developers.

Cause-specific

  • Ada Initiative – existed from 2011 to 2015; advocated the participation of women in FOSS development.
  • PyLadies – founded in 2011; advocates for female participation in the Python community.

Legal aid

  • IfrOSS – provides legal services for free software in Germany.
  • Software Freedom Law Center – founded in 2005; provides free legal representation and other legal services to not-for-profit FOSS projects.

User groups

  • GNU/Linux Users Groups

References

  1. ↑ "Apache Software Foundation". https://www.apache.org. 
  2. ↑ X.Org Is Formally Invited To Become An SPI Project, Michael Larabel
  3. ↑ About the NetBSD Foundation
  4. ↑ VideoLAN – History



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