The Open Web Foundation (OWF) is an American non-profit organization dedicated to the development and protection of specifications for emerging web technologies. The foundation follows an open source model similar to the

Apache Software Foundation The Apache Software Foundation ( ; ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation (classified as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States) to support a number of open-source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the ...

(ASF). Individuals participating include Geir Magnusson, vice president and board member at Apache, and

Tim O'Reilly Timothy O'Reilly (born 6 June 1954) is an Irish-American author and publisher, who is the founder of O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly & Associates). He popularised the terms open source and Web 2.0. Education and early life Born in County Co ...

, CEO of

O'Reilly Media O'Reilly Media, Inc. (formerly O'Reilly & Associates) is an American learning company established by Tim O'Reilly that provides technical and professional skills development courses via an online learning platform. O'Reilly also publishes b ...

History

The Open Web Foundation was announced July 24, 2008 at the

O'Reilly Open Source Convention The O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) was an American annual convention for the discussion of free and open-source software. It was organized by publisher O'Reilly Media and was held each summer, mostly in Portland, Oregon, from 1999 to ...

(OSCON). Facebook has announced their support for the OWF, as well as Google, MySpace, Six Apart, Plaxo and others. Through OWF, Google and Facebook now have an appropriate venue where they can resolve their differences between Facebook Connect and OpenSocial platforms, as well as work on a standard way to have their users interact with each other. The OWF also provides the technical details, as well as policy details, on how these protocols and emerging technologies interact.

Criticism

In 2008, Microsoft's Dare Obasanjo made accusations that employees of the Open Web Foundation were bypassing the

IETF The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet standard, Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster ...

or other regulatory standards.

Industry support

According to its web site, the Open Web Foundation is supported by the following companies and organizations: *

BBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

MySpace Myspace (formerly stylized as MySpace, currently myspace; and sometimes my␣, with an elongated Whitespace character#Substitute images, open box symbol) is a social networking service based in the United States. Launched on August 1, 2003, it w ...

* O'Reilly * Plaxo *

Six Apart Six Apart Ltd., sometimes abbreviated 6A, is a software company known for creating the Movable Type blogware, TypePad blog hosting service, and Vox (the blogging platform). The company also is the former owner of LiveJournal. Six Apart is ...

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service founded by Geoffrey B. Jeffery, Tim Perdue, and Drew Streib in November 1999. SourceForge provides a centralized software discovery platform, including an online platform for managing and hosting open-source soft ...

* Vidoop *

Yahoo Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, an ...

Governance

The Open Web Foundation is a membership-based organization. Members of the Foundation elect a nine-person Board. Members of the current Board, elected as of August 17, 2009: * Brady Brim-DeForest * Tantek Celik * DeWitt Clinton * Chris Messina * David Recordon * Lawrence Rosen * David Rudin * Gabe Wachob

References

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External links