The Linux Foundation today announced the creation of the JS Foundation. The JS Foundation was founded by Bocoup, IBM, Ripple, Samsung, Sauce Labs, SitePen, StackPath, the University of Westminster, and WebsiteSetup.
The JS Foundation has an initial batch of donated software for it to monitor, maintain and manage. These projects include Sauce Labs’ Appium, IBM’s Node-RED, and Samsung’s JerryScript JavaScript engine for IoT devices.
Jonathan Lipps, architect and project lead on Appium, said that the move to the JS Foundation was partially motivated by the restrictions some firms placed on their open-source contributions. While the project was offered under the Apache 2.0 license, some larger companies were not able to contribute because the copyrights still belonged to Sauce Labs.
Lipps said the move to the JS Foundation means that everyone can contribute to the project without worrying about such restrictions. He said that, thus far, Appium has gained enough momentum to make an impact in mobile testing, but to expand it further required more participation from the community.
An example of this, said Lipps, is the integrations done by Microsoft to Appium. According to him, “We recently did an integration with Microsoft to enable Windows developers to test desktop applications using Appium. Microsoft said, ‘We think Appium is really great. We have a mission to put functional test automation into Windows and we’d like to built that into Appium. We’ll put it in Visual Studio.’ That wasn’t driven by Sauce’s road map. [Sauce never planned to] offer products for Windows application developers. That’s the vision of Appium: to be this umbrella of test using whatever frameworks and languages you like.”
Despite the move to the JS Foundation, Lipps said the road map for Appium is unlikely to change immediately. “I think in large part the road map will remain the same. As more people get involved, the road map will be driven more by the community rather than by what we hear Sauce customers say,” he said.
