Open Source Software (OSS) Foundations Officially Join Unity Foundation
Unity Foundation is pleased to announce the addition of three Open Source Software (OSS) Foundations as official member organizations of the Unity team. Established in 2020 as a non-profit, community-based organization, Unity Foundation set out on a journey to leverage open source software tools to provide more inherently equitable access to the information and services that support the needs of the greater St. Louis area community, with a focus on the underserved.
Dr. Ebrahim Moshiri, founder of St. Louis-based technology company, Object Computing, Inc. (OCI), envisioned a radically new way of serving the community by extending all of the openly available tools and systems that OCI had been building, supporting, and advancing for the last three decades. Unity Foundation was organized to drive the engineering of a new kind of infrastructure and data sharing ecosystem that, through collaborations and partnerships with other St. Louis based organizations, can address the Digital Divide in our region. In essence, Unity seeks to apply the ideals of altruism, benevolence, and social consciousness to the world of software tools and systems that organizations use to collect, organize, and share data.
As a commitment to reusable and interoperable technologies to facilitate greater access and capability for all users, OCI made significant investments in establishing three OSS product foundations - Grails Foundation, Micronaut Foundation, and OpenDDS Foundation. These non-profit entities are solely focused on ensuring the continuity and sustainability of the OSS products. Today, thousands of software engineers, researchers, and end users around the globe use and contribute to these tools, and organizations including Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, and Google leverage these trusted tools and platforms. The Micronaut Foundation’s Advisory Board in particular includes representatives from these well-known technology leaders.
Moving the OSS Foundations under Unity provides a very meaningful integration and alliance between Unity and those open source communities. Each of the Foundations will have the opportunity to work more closely with Unity in building an open source technology infrastructure and ecosystem that serves our underserved communities. Unity will continue its commitment to serve as an OSS aggregator, and will scale community participation in helping define, advance, and contribute to the ongoing success and sustainability of the open source products.
In January 2023, Object Computing and Unity Foundation together pledged an additional $2M for the ongoing benefit and advancement of the OpenDDS Project, the Micronaut framework, and the Grails framework, through their respective non-profit Foundations. While Unity is now the proud steward of these Foundations, they are equally committed to finding new ways to collaborate with community partners who, like them, deeply desire to build and contribute to a new CommUNITY infrastructure - one that will be engineered for equity, accessibility, enrichment, and compassion for those who need it most.