OpenFoundry

» see openfoundry.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Taiwan ran a state-funded open source office for twelve years, inside Academia Sinica, and almost nobody outside Taiwan knew it existed. OpenFoundry hosted free software projects and answered licensing questions in Chinese. It also lent out the institute's international conference hall for community events at roughly a tenth of the market rate, which turns out to be the part people missed most.

The Chinese name was 自由軟體鑄造場, the free software foundry, and it started in 2003 when the Institute of Information Science took a grant from the Ministry of Economic Affairs' Industrial Development Bureau under a program for promoting a free software industry. The first principal investigator was Der-Tsai Lee (李德財), an Academia Sinica academician. In 2009 the whole operation moved across to the Research Center for Information Technology Innovation, and one of the later co-investigators was Jane W. S. Liu (張韻詩), better known internationally for real-time operating systems than for open source advocacy.

The legal desk was the piece with no equivalent anywhere else in the region. Free software is free to use and expensive to get wrong, and the licensing procedures around it produce disputes and sometimes lawsuits between companies. OpenFoundry researched license terms and tracked cases, publishing on commercial use models and on government policy, and it gave basic consultations to anybody who turned up with a licensing question. Its project manager 洪華超 put the value of that plainly: it kept ordinary people and small startups out of time-consuming litigation. There was a newsletter carrying it all, with a standing legal column.

It also brought people to Taipei. Richard Stallman came in 2005 and Mark Shuttleworth in 2006. The office ran the International Conference on Open Source and the first Students' Information Technology Conference in March 2013, and it sponsored COSCUP along with the local Ruby and PHP gatherings.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the three platforms ~

Who's Who was the platform for people, a talent database of Taiwanese free software developers drawn out of the community and the universities and industry, where a company looking for somebody who knew a stack could go and find them. The public-facing site was the second platform, carrying project news, community events, licensing material and teaching resources.

The hosting platform was the third, and the detail I like best there is the intake process. When you set up a project you chose a source code license and, separately, a license for the text and images, and you decided whether the project was visible at all. Then a human being read your application. The published turnaround was up to seventy-two hours, because somebody had to sit down and go through it.

~ the funding line ~

OpenFoundry was a three-year-cycle grant. Academia Sinica's innovation center disbursed the money in line with national policy, and in January 2015 the Ministry of Science and Technology decided to reallocate, suspending the free software allocation and ending the project at the close of the year. iThome broke it on 21 January 2015 and then spent the article collecting what Taiwan was about to lose.

Eddie Kao (高見龍) of 5xRuby said that five or six years earlier, when the Taiwanese open source community was at full strength, there were more than ten open source conferences a year and most of them ran on OpenFoundry sponsorship. His exact words were that without OpenFoundry those events simply could not have been held. Jim Huang (黃敬群), the Linux kernel developer who lectured at National Cheng Kung University, pointed out that it had been one of the earliest official open source bodies anywhere in Asia. Chao-kuei Hong (洪朝貴) of the Software Liberty Association gave the sharpest reading of the decision: the government looked at free software through an economy-boosting lens, and when no measurable economic result came back it stopped paying.

This is the part that does not need translating. A three-year cycle closes and the thing that was working stops working, with the institutional memory walking out of the building on the last day. Engineers in Ankara know that shape as well as engineers in Nangang do.

~ the mirror ~

On 22 January 2015, the day after the news broke, Ben Jai (翟本喬) posted on Facebook telling everybody not to worry, because he would find people and money and take the project over. It did not happen. The project ended on schedule at the end of 2015.

What answers at openfoundry.org today is a copy. Every page carries an HTTrack Website Copier comment stamped 23 September 2025, the same crawl is reachable at ossf.denny.one, and the response headers say GitHub Pages behind Cloudflare. Taiwan's free software project hosting service now survives as a static crawl on somebody else's project host, kept up by a volunteer.

The community side was already covered. The Open Culture Foundation had been set up in June 2014 by people out of the same community and took over the advocacy role. On the government side what remained was the Ministry of Education's campus free software consulting center, contracted out to the Software Liberty Association of Taiwan and aimed at primary and middle schools.

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