Many excellent Open Source Software initiatives become so big or so critical to various users that they create some form of governance around the project. Sometimes it's not around a single project but around a concept or group of ideas. Here are some of my thoughts, open for debate and comments from others.

Introduction

Many geospatial project communities (e.g. MapServer) are at the point where they needs more innovative ways of managing project direction. A non-profit foundation or society can help the community to be more organized. It could pursue funding to pay for further developement, or to help maintain vital infrastructure components. It could also serve as a professional advocate or association that represents projects to schools, industry, government and others.

This document reviews some other open source software foundations and introduces some of the key concepts and how they could help our software communities.

Index

• What do I mean by Foundation?
• Potential Tasks and Responsibilities of a foundation
• Example Foundations and what they do
• Other related links/documents