The Rails Foundation announces its official launch with a mission to improve documentation, education, marketing, and events in the ecosystem to benefit all new and existing Rails developers. The foundation was started by a number of companies closely related to Rails. In alphabetical order, the eight founding core members are: Cookpad, Doximity, Fleetio, GitHub, Intercom, Procore, Shopify and 37signals.

Together, these corporate members provided $1,000,000 in seed funding to the foundation; the founding core members are represented on the foundation’s board of directors, chaired by Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson.The Board’s first order of business was to hire a full-time executive director to oversee the day-to-day operations of the new nonprofit 501(c)6 foundation and to work with freelancers and contributors to fulfill the foundation’s mission.

Currently, the Rails Foundation has an exclusive long-term license to all Ruby on Rails trademarks and will be responsible for maintaining and growing the rubyonrails.org website, social media channels, and all other channels that may help further its mission. The Rails Core Team will continue to have overall responsibility for the technical development of the framework, managing code contributions and managing new releases. The Rails Foundation and the Rails Core Team will work together to ensure its ecosystem remains healthy, continuously improving, and more attractive to newcomers in the future.

The announcement said,It’s been more than 18 years since Ruby on Rails was first released; today, while the project is iteratively updated, a large ecosystem has grown around it. But after all these years, building a strong ecosystem doesn’t just depend on good code; if Rails is going to survive in the long run, it has to be more accessible to the general public or developers interested in learning Rails. The reasons are mainly documentation, education, marketing and event issues. The Rails Foundation was formed to address all of these issues and more.

Next, in addition to making good use of the initial $1 million,The Rails Foundation is also open to new contributing corporate members. Interested parties can apply for membership by sending an email to foundation@rubyonrails.org. “If your company has benefited from Rails for years but wasn’t sure how to give back to the ecosystem, now there is a clear and obvious choice. We’re excited to start a new era of the Ruby on Rails ecosystem!”