The Linux Foundation had a lot of news to share during the first day of its Open Source Summit in Vienna, Austria. Several new subgroups have been formed within the organization to support popular technologies and practices.

Here are some highlights from Day 1:

Announcing the Developer Relations Foundation 

The organization announced plans to form the Developers Relations Foundation (DRF), which will focus on driving interest and awareness into the importance of the developer relations (DevRel) role within software development. 

Its Steering committee will include members from global DevRel leaders, and according to the Linux Foundation, the new group already has support from DevRel communities, including Aerospike, Ant Group, Hookdeck, MoonGift, SUSE, and TraceLink.

“Establishing the Developer Relations Foundation is a pivotal moment for our community,” said Stacey Kruczek, director of developer relations and community at Aerospike. “This foundation will create a unified, supportive ecosystem where knowledge, resources, and best practices are shared. By endorsing this initiative, Aerospike underscores the importance of empowering developers, enhancing their experiences, and advancing the entire tech industry. We deeply appreciate the support and guidance from the Linux Foundation. Together, we can drive innovation and foster a more inclusive and dynamic developer relations community.”

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AWS donates OpenSearch to Linux Foundation

OpenSearch is a search engine for enterprise data that enables companies to search, analyze, and visualize their data. It was created in 2021 and has been downloaded by over 700 million people. 

To support the project, the Linux Foundation announced that it is forming the OpenSearch Software Foundation to drive the growth and maintenance of the project. 

At launch, the new foundation has support for premier Linux Foundation members AWS, SAP, and Uber, and general members Aiven, Aryn, Atlassian, Canonical, DigitalOcean, Eliatra, Graylog, NetApp Instaclustr, and Portal26. 

“The Linux Foundation is excited to provide a neutral home for open and collaborative development around open source search and analytics,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation. “Search is something we all rely on every day, for both business and consumer purposes, and we look forward to supporting the OpenSearch community and helping them provide powerful search and analytics tools for organizations and individuals around the world.”

Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust forms

Another new group under the Linux Foundation umbrella that was announced today is LF Decentralized Trust, which will build a foundation for open source decentralized technology ecosystems. 

It has support from over 100 Linux Foundation members and will launch with 17 total projects, including the entire Hedera codebase, which will live at the Linux Foundation under the name Hiero. 

“Around the world, decentralized technologies are modernizing critical systems and core infrastructure,” said Daniela Barbosa, general manager of decentralized technologies at the Linux Foundation and executive director of LF Decentralized Trust. “LF Decentralized Trust is the new home for collaboratively developing the ecosystems that will make these trusted systems and applications. We are launching with a powerful mix of ledger, identity, cryptography, interoperability, and implementation projects and a diverse, committed membership base. And we are just getting started. Our mission is to drive collective innovation that delivers transparency, reliability, security, and efficiency on a global scale.”

Linux Foundation, CNCF, and Unified Patents continue the fight against patent trolls

The Linux Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) also announced that they are improving their existing work with Unified Patents to protect open source projects from non-practicing entities (NPEs), or “patent trolls,” which are entities that buy up patents and then seek to profit from them. 

As a part of the partnership, Linux Foundation and CNCF members will get access to benefits like annual NPE risk analysis, patent portfolio analysis, Unified Patents’ PATROLL prior art bounty program, updates on NPE activities, specialized events, and the ability to sponsor PATROLL contests and participate in the royalty-free licenses granted in resulting settlements. 

“The expansion of our partnership with the Linux Foundation and CNCF is a significant step forward in the ongoing battle against patent trolls,” said Shawn Ambwani, chief operating officer at Unified Patents. “By combining our expertise and resources, we are better equipped to protect the open source community from those who seek to exploit the system for profit without contributing to innovation.”