The Open Web Foundation
Today marks what we believe to be a very important step in progression of the open web. Earlier this morning at OSCON, David Recordon of Six Apart announced the launch of the Open Web Foundation.
The website’s own short summary, I think, does the best justice in describing its goals:
The Open Web Foundation is an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies.
We love that idea.
We really believe that, for some time, all future innovation will be directly imposed on the web, or will somehow be web-related. There was this same period just a decade or two ago on the desktop. Unlike what happened with most of the important protocols and formats that came out of the desktop innovation period, I think there’s a really good chance that most of what comes out of this period of innovation will, indeed, be open.
This is why the Open Web Foundation is so important — there needs to be a place accepted by the “major players” in the Internet space (Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, MySpace, SourceForge and Six Apart are among the founding members) that is simply there to incubate and further develop these specifications, as well as keep them open and make sure that there are no Intellectual Property issues in using these specifications in your own products, regardless of whether those products are proprietary or open source.
When the website launched, we were quick to jump and apply. I am pleased to say that Squish Software is now a contributing member of the Open Web Foundation. We hope to contribute wherever we can with whatever we can, as well as make sure that all applicable open web standards are used in our products.
We look forward to what comes out of the Open Web Foundation. The future could be very, very exciting (and very, very open).
