NEW YORK, Oct. 16 - The Open Bioinformatics Foundation has incorporated as a not-for-profit company in Delaware in a move to sustain its growing administrative role, according to Chris Dagdigian of Blackstone Computing, who serves as the group’s treasurer.
The foundation began several years ago with a core group of volunteers from various open-source bioinformatics projects, such as BioPerl, BioJava, BioPython, and BioCorba. As the projects grew, Dagdigian said, it became clear to the core group that a more formal structure would soon be necessary to support the increased responsibilities of the effort.
“We realized that as our group moved beyond its Internet-only activities and started organizing events and dealing with financial issues that it would make a lot more sense for the Open Bioinformatics Foundation to become a not-for-profit company,” Dagdigian said.
Its status as a 501c3 non-profit, formalized on Oct. 4, will also enable the group more easily to manage contracts and tangible assets like servers and domain names for new projects, and more easily accept tax-deductible donations.
The group has already gained the backing of Sun Microsystems, which donated approximately $39,000 worth of hardware over the summer.
The foundation is also hosting two new projects: BioMoby and BioSOAP. More details about these projects as well as the organizational status of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation are available at http://open-bio.org .