The Linux Foundation is giving JavaScript projects a new home. The company announced the JS Foundation is now a Linux Foundation Project. The JS Foundation was designed to foster JavaScript applications and server-side projects by providing best practices and policies.

“The Linux Foundation’s primary mission is to create the world’s largest shared technology investment,” said Kris Borchers, executive director of the JS Foundation. “JavaScript is an extremely important programming language, which has seen numerous open-source projects arise around it. Many of these projects are essential to the infrastructure of the Internet, so the Linux Foundation feels it is important to ensure they have structured support and neutral governance to ensure their stability, which is why the JS Foundation is being formed.”

(Related: JavaScript’s promising future)

Under the Linux Foundation, the JS Foundation will feature a new open technical governance structure as well as a mentorship program that will encourage collaboration and long-term sustainability for other JavaScript projects. Initial projects in the mentorship program include Appium, Interledger.js, JerryScript, Mocha, Moment.js, Node-RED and webpack.

“The Linux Foundation more than any other industry organization excels at serving the needs of developers,” said Borchers. “Developers rely on a growing portfolio of open-source technologies that are progressing at an ever faster rate. Being a part of the Linux Foundation’s portfolio of technologies will enable cross-project collaboration that best serves as many developers as possible as well as the entire JavaScript ecosystem.”

According to Borchers, the goal of the foundation is to:

  • “Drive widespread adoption and continued development of key JavaScript solutions and related technologies;
  • Facilitate collaboration within the JavaScript development community;
  • Create a center of gravity for open-source projects throughout the end-to-end JavaScript ecosystem guiding them toward open governance and diverse collaborator bases;
  • Host the infrastructure to support JS Foundation projects;
  • Enable, through advancement of the JS Foundation’s projects and strategic partnerships, an open and accessible web.”

In addition, the JS Foundation will work with the Node.js Foundation as its commitment to the JavaScript community is closely aligned, according to Borchers. According to Mikeal Rogers, community manager for the Node.js Foundation, the JS Foundation will be able to fulfill a goal that Node.js hasn’t been able to take on: supporting third-party packages.

“We are focused on Node core, but many of our users depend on a lot of third-party packages, and when those packages become big enough, it would be really nice if they had a foundation to go into, something to protect the IP and do all the things that we do for core that make it remain stable,” he said. “Now that JS foundation can really provide that for our users, we don’t have to become a large umbrella organization.”

The JS Foundation and its projects will continue to be community-driven and supported, and it will continue to work with standards bodies such as the W3C, WHATWG and Ecma TC39.

Founding members of the foundation include Bocoup, IBM, Ripple, Samsung, Sauce Labs, Sense Tecnic Systems, SitePen, StackPath, the University of Westminster, and WebsiteSetup.

“This is an exciting time for the JavaScript community,” said Angel Diaz, vice president of cloud technology and architecture for IBM, in a statement. “By bringing together the community around core platform technologies and the application tier with the JS Foundation, the industry is establishing a center of gravity to drive innovation in the open through code, collaboration and community development. We’re proud to continue our long tradition of supporting open tech communities by becoming a founding member of the JS Foundation, which we believe will set the bar for openly governed JavaScript projects.”