About Structured World

Structured World is a non-profit association being formed in Romania (asociație under OG 26/2000). Its purpose is the development, promotion and support of open-source software and of open data standards, for the benefit of the general interest.

Open source here means truly open: software published in full under MIT or Apache 2.0, not open-core with proprietary extensions. And product data should be a public commons, not locked behind proprietary code systems.

Status

The founding members have signed the constitutive act and the statute, and the file has been submitted to the court for entry in the Register of Associations and Foundations. The association acquires legal personality on the day of that entry. Until then it has no bank account, no members beyond the founders, and no contracts; it does not collect donations and does not operate the funding platform. This page states the date of registration as soon as it is granted.

What It Will 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. The association will crowdfund specific features, tracked transparently, with the overwhelming majority of each donation going to the developer who builds the feature. The exact proportions are set each year by the Board of Directors and published in the internal regulations; a small share covers operations and promotion of the funded project.

Payments in crypto (USDT on Tron first, other networks as infrastructure grows) and by bank transfer. Every crypto donation is verifiable on-chain.

2. Build Open Data Standards

structured.world is the flagship project: a global, open product taxonomy with semantic property inheritance, a 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, JSON-LD and Protobuf
  • API: free read access with fair-use rate limits
  • EU DPP: entity properties map to DPP fields

3. Develop Open Source Tools

Software developed or financed by the association is released under MIT or Apache 2.0, never open-core. Two tools maintained by the founders are the first candidates for its programmes:

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

Legal Structure

  • Asociația Structured World: Romanian non-profit association under OG 26/2000, registered office in Bucharest, registration pending
  • Governance: General Assembly of members, a Board of Directors, an annual activity and financial report published on this site, a public register of conflicts of interest
  • No subsidiaries and no commercial arm; income is used only for the statutory purpose and nothing is distributed to members
  • EU-based: once registered, eligible for Digital Europe and Horizon Europe programmes

Why “True Open Source”?

The open-source ecosystem has a problem: many “open source” projects are in fact open-core. The community edition is crippled and the real product is proprietary. Akeneo abandoned its community edition in 2023; Pimcore moved to a proprietary licence in 2025.

The association’s statute binds it to publish the software it develops or funds in full under permissive licences (MIT, Apache 2.0). Where a maintainer is unresponsive to community needs, the association may take over an abandoned open-source project and continue its development for the community.

Contact

Email: info@sw.foundation

GitHub: github.com/structured-world