The Open Source Summit Europe unveiled a new organization under the Linux Foundation, the LF AI and Data Foundation, merging the LF AI and ODPi. This new foundation will be dedicated to projects concerning artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), data, and analytics.
The reason for this was that more and more data projects are joining LF AI and it was more appropriate to have them all under the same organization. Now, the LF AI and Data Foundation can better address issues like fragmentation, lack of integration, and governance across open-source AI projects.
On the other hand, the ODPi was starting to put a lot of attention to Egeria, a standard for exchanging metadata between products and databases. However, although different products and projects often store similar entities, they might store them in various ways. Hence, exchanging data or applying compliance and security rules across a whole organization is challenging.
Currently, ODPi has seven members including IBM, Cloudera, and SAS, while LF AI presents 11 premier members, 14 general members, and 12 associate members. Yet, it is noticeable that these lists do not include well-known AI, ML, or open-source projects companies.
These companies are still hosting projects with the new merged foundation, without being members. They are also using or integrating some of the foundation’s projects in their cloud offerings. So why not be a member?
The merge was apparently done in order to increase the scope and clout of the foundation and get more support from these well-known companies.