Today, at the OSGeo board meeting the graduation of the GDAL, GRASS GIS and FDO projects from incubation was approved. The Open Source Geospatial Foundation has been created to support and build the highest-quality open source geospatial software. The foundation’s goal is to encourage the use and collaborative development of community-led projects. All OSGeo projects are undergoing an incubation process to ensure that projects that are able to become official part of OSGeo. The criteria are:

• have a successfully operating open and collaborative development community
• have clear intellectual properties oversight of the code base of the project
• adopt the OSGeo principles and operating principles.

Projects are mentored through the incubation process, eventually the incubation committee is verifying if the project is ready for full status. The OSGeo Board of Directors accepts or rejects a project’s graduation from the incubator. Upon graduation, a member of the project’s PMC is selected to report to the foundation board periodically on project status.