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Last year in October, the Node.js and JS Foundations announced their intent to create a joint organization. After six months of analyzing community feedback, deliberation, and collaboration, the two foundations finally merged into the OpenJS Foundation on Tuesday.

Dave Methvin, Technical Advisory Committee Chair, JS Foundation, explaining the motivation behind this merger said in the announcement, “This is an exciting step forward for the entire open source JavaScript community, as it strengthens the impact of our collective efforts under one united Foundation. A new merged Foundation is able to better serve the community and members to grow the JavaScript ecosystem from a technology and standards perspective.

The OpenJS Foundation is backed by 30 corporate and end-user members including Google, Microsoft, IBM, PayPal, and GoDaddy. It currently hosts a wide range of projects including Appium, Dojo, jQuery, Node.js, webpack, and many more.

Goals of the OpenJS Foundation

Providing resources and accelerating the development

The OpenJS Foundation is responsible for expanding the JavaScript community and accelerating the development of JavaScript and other key ecosystem projects. It will provide financial and marketing resources to support projects and working groups. It will act as one stop for all projects within the open JavaScript community for fulfilling their infrastructure, technical, and marketing needs.

Combined governance structure

The merger will provide a combined governance structure to enable all projects, regardless of their sizes, to benefit from experienced mentors as they progress through the project life cycle. It will encourage collaboration across the JavaScript ecosystem and affiliated standard bodies to create a single home for any project in the JavaScript ecosystem.

Improved membership experience

The OpenJS Foundation brings together the goals of both the JavaScript and Node.js foundations, so companies or organizations that want to support JavaScript will no longer have to choose between the two.

This will also eliminate the operational redundancies between the two organizations and streamline the experience for member companies that provide financial support. Additionally, it will provide a single point of entry to new and prospective members for getting involved in open source JavaScript project and create a simpler and more engaging experience for them.

Many Twitter users were excited about this announcement and believe that this a major step towards the overall growth of the JavaScript open source ecosystem.

To know more in detail, check out the official announcement.

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