Its official. Shortly after the unanimous 9 to 0 vote of the Board of "Software in the Public Interest" (SPI) on a resolution to offer TideSDK "Affiliate Project" status; David Pratt, Project Lead for TideSDK accepted.
TideSDK is now under a US based non-profit and is now able to raise funds to support the team, development and infrastructure to ensure the long term viability of the software. This is a very big deal for the community and project (both in terms of recognition and what it will mean for the future).
This also fulfills the goal of the transition set out by Appcelerator Inc earlier this year to see the community led initiative transition between September and December 2012:
http://developer.appcelerator.com/blog/2012/01/the-future-of-titanium-desktop.html
TideSDK is in good company with other important and valuable open source projects under SPI such as Postgres, Debian, ArchLinux, Drupal and Jenkins. These are all reknown projects that virtually every developer or programmer is familiar with.
The core role of the SPI is to provide legal, adminstrative and financial services to the project. Companies and individuals may now donate to the SPI with funds being specifically earmarked to TideSDK. Copyright for the code developed on top of Appcelerator's original code will be jointly shared among its contributors and will remain open source.
Non-profit status has come at a time TideSDK is showing rising momentum and is getting close to releasing its 1.3.0-beta. Page views on its the new TideSDK site have been reaching 4000 per day with up to 8200 page views recently the updated API documentation. In genereral, the TideSDK team is finding excitement an ethusiasm about the upcoming release and there has been substanial twitter activity also in recent days.
We encourage you to join with us to make this great software better. Please visit our site at http://TideSDK.org, follow us on twitter for updates and information on the upcoming release http://twitter.com/TideSDK
If you like what we are doing, you will have the opportunity to demonstrate this through donation to see our efforts continue. We will setting up donation widgets an evaluating options for corporate and private donation. US companies and individual donations are tax deductible.
