The Linux Foundation Announces Intent to Form New Foundation to Support GraphQL

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announces a broad coalition of industry leaders and users have joined forces to create a new open source foundation for the GraphQL project, which will be dedicated to growing and sustaining a neutral GraphQL ecosystem. Hosted under the Linux Foundation, the GraphQL Foundation’s mission will be to enable widespread adoption and help accelerate development of GraphQL and the surrounding ecosystem.

“As one of GraphQL’s co-creators, I’ve been amazed and proud to see it grow in adoption since its open sourcing. Through the formation of the GraphQL Foundation, I hope to see GraphQL become industry standard by encouraging contributions from a broader group and creating a shared investment in vendor-neutral events, documentation, tools, and support,” said Lee Byron, co-creator of GraphQL.

GraphQL is a next­-generation API technology developed internally by Facebook in 2012 before being publicly open sourced in 2015. As application development shifts towards microservices architectures with an emphasis on flexibility and speed to market, tools like GraphQL are redefining API design and client-server interaction to improve the developer experience, increasing developer productivity and minimizing amounts of data transferred. GraphQL makes cross-platform and mobile development simpler with availability in multiple programming languages, allowing developers to create seamless user experiences for their customers.

GraphQL is being used in production by a variety of high scale companies such as Airbnb, Atlassian, Audi, CNBC, GitHub, Major League Soccer, Netflix, Shopify, The New York Times, Twitter, Pinterest and Yelp. GraphQL also powers hundreds of billions of API calls a day at Facebook.

“We are thrilled to welcome the GraphQL Foundation into the Linux Foundation. This advancement is important because it allows for long-term support and accelerated growth of this essential and groundbreaking technology that is changing the approach to API design for cloud-connected applications in any language,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, the Linux Foundation.

Unlike REST-­based APIs, which take advantage of HTTP and existing protocols, GraphQL APIs provide developers with the flexibility to query the exact data they need from a diverse set of cloud data sources, with less code, greater performance and security, and a faster development cycle. Not only does this enable developers to rapidly build top­ quality apps, it also helps them achieve consistency and feature parity across multiple platforms such as web, iOS, Android, and embedded and IoT applications.

The GraphQL Foundation will have an open governance model that encourages participation and technical contribution and will provide a framework for long-term stewardship by an ecosystem invested in GraphQL’s success.

“At Facebook, our mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. We believe open source projects and the communities built around them help accelerate the pace of innovation and bring many minds to bear to solve large-scale challenges. GraphQL is one such project and community and the GraphQL Foundation will help ensure GraphQL continues to solve the real data fetching challenges that developers will face in building the products of tomorrow,” said Killian Murphy, Director, Facebook Open Source.

“GraphQL has redefined how developers work with APIs and client-server interactions. We look forward to working with the diverse GraphQL community from end users like Facebook to a diverse ecosystem of vendors to become an independent foundation, draft their governance and continue to foster the growth and adoption of GraphQL,” said Chris Aniszczyk, Vice President of Developer Relations, the Linux Foundation.

Supporting Quotes

“Airbnb is making a massive investment in GraphQL, putting it at the center of our API strategy across both our product and internal tools. We are excited to see the Foundation play a key role in cultivating the community around GraphQL and continue to evolve GraphQL as a technology, paving the way for continued innovation of Airbnb’s API.” — Adam Neary, Tech Lead, Airbnb

“Given GraphQL’s centrality in the modern app development stack, the foundation we’re announcing today is not just necessary, but overdue. As the creators of Apollo, the most widely used implementation of GraphQL, we’re looking forward to working together with the Linux Foundation to define appropriate governance processes for this critical Internet standard.” – Geoff Schmidt, co­-founder and CEO of Apollo GraphQL

“GraphQL, and the strong ecosystem behind it, is leading to a fundamental change in how we build products, and it helps bring together teams and organizations of every size. At Coursera, GraphQL assists us in understanding the massive breadth of our APIs and helps us create transformative educational experiences for everyone, everywhere. We’re excited to see the impact of the GraphQL Foundation in making both the technology and the community stronger.” – Jon Wong, Staff Software Engineer, Coursera

“GraphQL has come a long way since its creation in 2012. It’s been an honor seeing the technology grow from a prototype, to powering Facebook’s core applications, to an open source technology on the way to becoming a ubiquitous standard across the entire industry. The GraphQL Foundation is an exciting step forward. This new governance model is a major milestone in that maturation process that will ensure a neutral venue and structure for the entire community to drive the technology forward.” – Nick Schrock, Founder, Elementl, GraphQL Co-Creator

“We created GraphQL at Facebook six years ago to help us build high-performance mobile experiences, so to see it grow and gain broad industry adoption has been amazing. Since Facebook open-sourced GraphQL in 2015, the community has grown to include developers around the world, newly-founded startups, and well-established companies. The creation of the GraphQL Foundation is a new chapter that will create a governance structure we believe will empower the community and provide GraphQL long-term technical success. I’m excited to see its continued growth under the Foundation’s guidance.” – Dan Schafer, Facebook Software Engineer, GraphQL Co-Creator

“GraphQL has proven to be a valuable, extensible tool for GitHub, our customers, and our integrators over the past two years. The GraphQL Foundation embodies openness, transparency, and community — all of which we believe in at GitHub.” – Kyle Daigle, Director, Ecosystem Engineering, GitHub

“This is a very welcome announcement, and we believe that this is a necessary step. The GraphQL community has grown rapidly over the last few years, and has reached the point where transparent, neutral governance policies are necessary for future growth. At Hasura, we look forward to helping the Foundation in its work.” – Tanmai Gopal, CEO, Hasura

“GraphQL has become one of the most important technologies in the modern application development stack and sees rapid adoption by developers and companies across all industries. At Prisma, we’re very excited to support the GraphQL Foundation to enable a healthy community and sustain the continuous development of GraphQL.” – Johannes Schickling, Founder and CEO, Prisma

“At Shopify, GraphQL powers our core APIs and all our mobile and web clients. We strongly believe in open development and look to the Foundation to help expand the community and nurture its evolution.” – Jean-Michel Lemieux, SVP Engineering, Shopify

“GraphQL is gaining tremendous adoption as one of the best protocols for remote retrieval of large object graphs. At Twitter, we are looking forward to what’s to come in the GraphQL ecosystem and are very excited to support the GraphQL Foundation.” – Anna Sulkina Sr. Engineering Manager, Core Services Group, Twitter