Slug: web-green-the-open-web-foundation Date: 2008-07-25 Title: “Web Green: The Open Web Foundation” layout: post

Today at O’Reilly’s OSCON, David Recordon announced the formation of a new foundation, the Open Web Foundation, with the goal of fostering development of open standards and providing an incubator for working out IPR and patent issues before standards are too widely deployed.

The Open Web Foundation is an attempt to create a home for community-driven specifications. Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification.

This is an awesome step and one that has been necessary for a long time. The Apache Foundation has provided a great model for software incubation, but to date there has not been an appropriate place to work out issues with new specifications. The Open Web Foundation will provide that place.

The OWF has a mailing list up for anyone wanting to get involved or follow the discussion. Details on foundation membership, etc, are still forthcoming but knowing the participants I’m certain things will be aboveboard.

I’m really excited to see the OWF come together - the environment in which web technologies are developed has changed, and the OWF is there to help provide a buffer for these new specs to be developed out in the open. As I wrote in Web Green: Cultivating The Open Web:

Like sediment in a river, or potting soil in a greenhouse, each layer we put down supports and affects the ecosystem that grows out of it. We take IP, ethernet, and their like completely for granted - they’ve been standardized and implemented across a worldwide network. That layer is foundation and fertilizer for the next: HTTP, SSL, HTML, XML, and the feed variants that have become the everyday building blocks of our applications and services. These are now settling into the foundation for the services we’re building now: near-real-time publishing and social software stacks. These, in turn, will provide for what comes after, and the philosophical foundations we build into this layer will profoundly affect the health of the next.

So here’s to the OWF: May the foundations of the next web be as open and implementable as the foundations of the first web were, and more.

grass image from pygment.com for whose proprietor I cannot find contact information.