The OpenDDS Foundation™ is pleased to announce a new partnership with the Unity Foundation™.

The OpenDDS Foundation is one of three Open Source Software (OSS) Foundations joining the Unity Foundation as official member organizations of the Unity team. Established in 2020 as a non-profit, community-based organization, Unity set out on a journey to leverage open source software tools to provide more inherently equitable access to the information and services that support the needs of the greater St. Louis area community, with a focus on the underserved.

Dr. Ebrahim Moshiri, founder of St. Louis-based technology company, Object Computing, Inc. (OCI), envisioned a radically new way of serving the community by extending all of the openly available tools and systems that OCI had been building, supporting, and advancing for the last three decades. The Unity Foundation was organized to drive the engineering of a new kind of CommUNITY Infrastructure and data sharing ecosystem that, through collaborations and partnerships with other St. Louis based organizations, can address the digital divide in our region. In essence, Unity seeks to apply the ideals of altruism, benevolence, and social consciousness to the world of software tools and systems that organizations use to collect, organize, and share data.

As a commitment to reusable and interoperable technologies to facilitate greater access and capability for all users, OCI made significant investments in establishing three OSS product Foundations - the OpenDDS Foundation™, the Micronaut Foundation™, and the Grails Foundation™. These non-profit entities are solely focused on ensuring the continuity and sustainability of our OSS products. Today, thousands of software engineers, researchers, and end users around the globe use and contribute to these trusted tools and platforms, including organizations like Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, and Google.

Moving the OpenDDS Foundation under Unity provides a meaningful alliance between Unity and our amazing community. We are excited for the opportunity to work closely with Unity to further develop an open source technology infrastructure and ecosystem supporting our underserved communities. Unity will continue its commitment to serve as an OSS aggregator, and will scale community participation in helping define, advance, and contribute to the ongoing success and sustainability of the OpenDDS project.

In January 2023, Object Computing and the Unity Foundation together pledged an additional $2M to the OpenDDS Foundation for the ongoing benefit and advancement of the OpenDDS project. As the proud steward of the OpenDDS Foundation, Unity continues its commitment to innovative collaboration with community partners with a deep desire to build and contribute to a new CommUNITY infrastructure - one that will be engineered for equity, accessibility, enrichment, and compassion for those who need it most.

To learn more about the Unity Foundation, click here.

To learn more about how you or your organization can support the OpenDDS Foundation, please check us out!