About SW Foundation

SW Foundation is a European non-profit (Romanian asociație) with a mission to fund true open-source development and build open data standards for the public good.

We believe open source means truly open — MIT and Apache 2.0 licensed, not open-core with proprietary extensions. And we believe product data should be a public commons, not locked behind GS1 paywalls.

What We Do

1. Fund Open Source Development

Most open-source projects have no sustainable funding model. Developers work for free while companies profit from their code. We change that by crowdfunding specific features — tracked transparently.

  • 90% goes to the developer building the feature
  • 5% goes to foundation operations (servers, payments, legal)
  • 5% goes to promoting the funded project (ads, content, outreach)

We accept crypto (USDT on Tron, with Ethereum and TON planned) and fiat (bank transfer). Every crypto donation is verifiable on-chain.

2. Build Open Data Standards

structured.world is our flagship project — a global, open product taxonomy with semantic property inheritance. It provides the data backbone for EU Digital Product Passport (DPP) compliance, at no cost to manufacturers.

  • Data: CC-BY-SA — free to use, share, and build upon
  • Schema: Apache 2.0 — open standard, JSON-LD + Protobuf
  • API: Free read access with fair-use rate limits
  • EU DPP: Entity properties map to DPP fields automatically

3. Develop Our Own OSS Tools

All software developed by the foundation is released under MIT or Apache 2.0 — never open-core. Current projects:

  • GitLab MCP — Model Context Protocol server for AI assistants with GitLab integration
  • Vue Privacy — Privacy-first consent management for Vue.js applications

Legal Structure

  • sw.foundation — Romanian asociație (non-profit, OG 26/2000)
  • SW Services SRL — 100% owned commercial subsidiary for taxonomy services
  • All SRL revenue reinvested into the foundation
  • EU-based: eligible for Digital Europe and Horizon Europe grants

Why “True Open Source”?

The open-source ecosystem has a problem: many “open source” projects are actually open-core — the community edition is crippled, and the real product is proprietary. Examples: Akeneo abandoned its CE in 2023, Pimcore switched to a proprietary license in 2025.

SW Foundation only funds and develops software under permissive licenses (MIT, Apache 2.0) or strong copyleft (AGPL). If a project maintainer is unresponsive to community needs, we can fork it and fund the development ourselves (SW Initiative).

Contact

Email: info@sw.foundation

GitHub: github.com/structured-world