The LLVM umbrella project has grown over the years into a vibrant community made up of many sub-projects, with hundreds of contributors.  The results of this project are used by millions of people every day.  Today, I'm happy to announce that we are taking the next big step, and forming a new, independent non-profit to represent the community interest.  "The LLVM Foundation" will allow us to:

 - Solve infrastructure problems.

 - Address financial challenges around the developer meetings and infrastructure expenses.

 - Deliver improved transparency into operational and policy matters

 - Provide a company-neutral organization to help ensure success well into the future.

We are working towards a goal of having this organization functioning by the end of the year, possibly sooner.

In terms of structure, we expect the foundation to be lean: an oversight board of volunteers and a dedicated administrator.  The expectations of this administrator will be to oversee long-overdue upgrades to our infrastructure (such as the web site design, bug database, mailing lists, etc), organize the US LLVM Developer Meeting, and drive the formation of the foundation itself.  We do not expect significant change to our developer policies (i.e. licensing & copyright).  Our system of domain-expert "code owners" will continue to drive the technical direction of their areas.  As an LLVM contributor, the biggest changes that you can expect to see are things operating more smoothly and infrastructure issues getting the attention they deserve.

Tanya Lattner has been spearheading the formation of the Foundation and has graciously agreed to take on the administrator role.  Tanya has been actively involved in LLVM since 2003.  Many of you know Tanya from her LLVM community involvement such as organizing the US LLVM Developer Meetings and management of the website and other infrastructure.  She implemented Swing Modulo Scheduling in LLVM for her Masters thesis at UIUC, served as the release manager from LLVM 1.7 through 2.7, and in a commercial setting she implemented LLVM based optimization tools and contributed to an LLVM-based OpenCL implementation.

We have also been quietly speaking with members of the community, working to select a diverse board of directors, that accurately reflects the community’s interests.  We looked to active members of the community, representing both academic and commercial interests, people from organizations that contribute to the developer meeting and testing infrastructure, and technical leads from some of the prominent LLVM sub-projects.  We sought diversity in the board, while trying to keep it small enough to be nimble.  The initial board of directors will be:

Vikram Adve

Chandler Carruth

Doug Gregor

David Kipping

Anton Korobeynikov

Chris Lattner

Tanya Lattner

Alex Rosenberg

I expect that there will be many questions and comments.  The foundation is intended to represent the interests of the community, so please send questions to the LLVMdev mailing list.  More information will be coming over the next few months as things progress.

-Chris