The GraphQL Foundation recently announced collaboration with the Joint Development Foundation to continue developing the GraphQL specification and accelerate the adoption of open-source and standards for API development and consumption.
GraphQL originated in 2012 in Facebook as an API for Facebook News Feed and later extended to support the majority of Facebook's products. After undergoing an internal redesign, GraphQL was subsequently shared with the broader community in 2015. The GraphQL community has grown today to encompass a large set of actors, from hobbyists to large companies, including innovative companies whose main goal is to build new tools and services for GraphQL. As Lee Byron, co-creator of GraphQL, explains:
Today, GraphQL has been a community project longer than it was a Facebook internal project — which calls for its next evolution. (...) [With the GraphQL Foundation], we hope to create a space for our community to work together to help GraphQL become a reliable industry standard by encouraging broad contributions and a shared investment in vendor-neutral events, documentation, tools, and support.
The GraphQL Foundation announced collaboration with the Joint Development Foundation, which itself joined the Linux Foundation family to drive adoption of open source and standards. The collaboration will allow GraphQL to benefit from the experience, expertise, legal structure and funding abilities of these bodies, with the end goal to accelerate the standards, open-source ecosystem, and tooling for API development and consumption.
The GraphQL Foundation will gather and take from the experience of the following members: Apollo, AWS, Butterfly Network, Dgraph Labs, Facebook, Gatsby, GraphZen, Hasura, IBM, Intuit, Neo4j, Novvum, PayPal, Pipefy, Salsify, Solo.io and Thicit.
Juan Carlos Soto, VP Hybrid Cloud Integration and API Economy for IBM, explains membership motivation:
We are pleased to join the new GraphQL Foundation as a founding member to help drive greater open source innovation and adoption of this important data access language and runtime for APIs.
Tim Govers, CEO of Thicit, expressed its enthusiasm:
GraphQL, and alongside its tooling, has grown to prove its worth and is here to stay. Time for a power-up supported by many hands and brains through the Joint Development Foundation and Linux Foundation. (...) Looking forward to new and improved powers, to evolution.
The Linux Foundation aims to be the organization of choice for building open source ecosystems by providing financial and intellectual resources, infrastructure, services, events, and training.
The Joint Development Foundation provides the corporate and legal infrastructure to enable groups to quickly establish and operate lightweight collaborations to develop technical specifications, standards, and source code. The Joint Development Foundation contends that "by using established Joint Development Foundation legal agreements, projects may establish themselves, collect funds, issue press releases in the project’s name, develop liaison relationships, and hold copyrights, all without negotiating custom agreements and new corporate organizations".
