10 FOSS Groups You Need To Know About!

  Are you a believer of the open source movement? We bring to you 10 Free and Open Source groups that are an integral part of the open source movement! 

The history of Open source is complex and fascinating. And while every single contribution in the revolution means a lot, there are a few organizations who are so dedicated to the free and open source that the movement is incomplete without them. Here's a list of 10 such groups!

 Thursday, October 10, 2013:  Right from the underlying philosophy and the supported licenses to shared and community based process of code creation, it's no secret why terms like "revolution" and "movement" are associated with open source.

1. Creative Commons (CC)

As a big believer in the "open source spirit," it's hard to think of an organization that, while not solely dedicated to safeguarding software freedom, takes that spirit more to heart. Creative Commons licenses, particularly Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported -- do for all creative works what open source software licenses do for computer programs.

2. Free Software Foundation (FSF)

Both revered and contentious, the FSF is, arguably, the reason that free and open source software exists today. While there are some philosophical differences between free software and open source, the Foundation, founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, is responsible for many of the cornerstones that open source depends on to this day.

3. Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA)

While it is still in progress, it is surely an organisation that will be a strong part of the open source's future. The explosion of interest in open source hardware is affecting every corner of the open source community ... and, undoubtedly, it will be for years to come.

4. Open Source Initiative (OSI)

Every community has standard-bearers, and in the open source world, it's the OSI. As maintainers of both the Open Source Definition and the officially approved open source licenses, the Initiative shoulders a lot of responsibility. And, that's on top of global efforts to advocate for and teach about open source software!

5. The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)

Think "Apache" is nothing more than an HTTP server? Think again! The Foundation, which manages nearly 200 separate open source projects, is at the heart of many open source applications, while the Apache License is the legal wrapper around their distribution.

7. The Linux Foundation (LF)

To many people, the story of Linux is the story of open source. So, a foundation that aims to standardize, protect, and promote "Linux by providing unified resources and services needed for open source to successfully compete with closed platforms" is as open source as it gets.

8. The Mozilla Foundation

Champions of open source software who describe themselves as "a non-profit organization that promotes openness, innovation and participation on the Internet," the Foundation is responsible for so much more than the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client.

9. The Perl Foundation (TPF)

Often criticized these days for being too cryptic and hard to maintain, the Perl programming language was the open source technology that powered early websites. In fact, PHP was, itself, originally written in Perl. To this day, Perl's regular expression engine and library of over 110,000 community-contributed modules is the envy of and model for many other open source programming languages.

10. The Python Software Foundation

If Perl powered Web 1.0, Python seems to be emerging as the engine behind much of Web 2.5-ish. Between Google's heavy interest in Python and open source hardware's apparent love for the language, a lot of next generation open source software is currently being developed in Python.

Courtesy: About.com
 
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