The Free Standards Group was an industry non-profit consortium chartered to primarily specify and drive the adoption of open source standards, founded on May 8, 2000.

All standards developed by the Free Standards Group (FSG) were released under open terms (the GNU Free Documentation License with no cover texts or invariant sections) and test suites, sample implementations and other software were released as free software.

On January 22, 2007, the Free Standards Group and the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) merged to form The Linux Foundation, narrowing their focus to promoting Linux in competition with Microsoft Windows.

Work groups

FSG was responsible for the following work groups, and transferred responsibility to The Linux Foundation:

  • The Linux Standard Base (LSB), a set of interface standards to maintain ultimate portability of applications across various Linux versions and distributions. Conformance with this specification is certified by The Open Group (under contract with the Free Standards Group).
  • The Open Internationalization Initiative (OpenI18N), a standard that creates a foundation for language globalization of compliant distributions and applications
  • The Linux Assigned Names and Numbers Authority (LANANA)
  • OpenPrinting, creating a scalable printing architecture and high-level requirements for a standardized printing system
  • Accessibility, developing accessibility standards for free and open source platforms
  • Open Cluster, defining a set of clustering interface standards
  • The DWARF Debugging Format Standard

Corporate members

Advanced Micro Devices Dell Hewlett-Packard Intel Corporation International Business Machines Linuxcare Mandriva Miracle Linux GoogleMontaVista Oracle Corporation (Platinum Member) Red Hat SCO Group Sun Microsystems Novell (through its acquisition of SUSE) Turbolinux VA Software

Not-for-profit members

The Free Standards Group also had individual memberships; the board of directors was elected annually by all of the membership.

See also