LF AI & Data Foundation

A project proposes itself with a pull request to the lfai/proposing-projects repository, using the foundation’s proposal template, and a TAC member is appointed as its sponsor. The donor has to be a member: the foundation says that if a donating company isn’t one, it first has to join LF AI & Data and the Linux Foundation, which is why SpiralDB, Vortex’s donor, is a General member. A project turned down for a higher stage may apply again after six months. Changes to the lifecycle document itself need votes of both the TAC and the Governing Board.

The foundation’s records lag its votes. Vortex was donated as a sandbox project in June 2025 and promoted to incubation in August 2025, when the LF’s press release called it “a new Incubation-stage project”, but the landscape data, last refreshed on October 15, 2026, still marked it sandbox. The foundation’s “incubation levels” web page still lists lower bars than the 2023 lifecycle document, two contributing organisations and 300 stars for incubation, and the project table in the proposals repository ends in October 2024 with DeepSpeed, which has been a PyTorch Foundation project since May 2025 and no longer appears on the projects page.

The Governing Board manages the fund: it approves the budget, elects a Chair and a Treasurer, and approves new projects in addition to the TAC. Its voting members are one representative of each Premier member, the TAC chair, and General-member representatives elected each year, one for every eight General members up to three, with at least one. No group of related companies may have more than two representatives on the board. Decisions at a meeting need a simple majority with half the voting representatives present, and amending the charter needs two-thirds of the whole board and the LF’s approval. Day-to-day work is done by LF staff: when IBM contributed Docling, Data Prep Kit and BeeAI in April 2025, the LF’s Todd Moore was the foundation’s interim executive director.

The Technical Advisory Council coordinates the projects, recommends where money should go and maintains the lifecycle. Its voting members are one representative of each Premier member and one from each “TAC Project”; graduation brings the right to such a seat, so the four Premier companies vote alongside up to 12 graduated projects. The charter sets annual dues of $100,000 for Premier members, $5,000 to $25,000 for General members depending on headcount, and nothing for Associates, which must be non-profits, open-source projects or government bodies. LF membership is paid on top, and the LF takes a fee of 9% of the fund’s first $1 million of receipts each year and 6% above that.

The charter requires any trademark relating to the fund or a project to be transferred to and held by LF Projects, LLC under its trademark policy. A sandbox project signs a contribution agreement transferring its assets to the Linux Foundation, gives the LF co-ownership of its GitHub organisation and installs the DCO app on every repository, so contributors sign off their commits. Projects use the LF Projects code of conduct unless another is approved, and are encouraged to put SPDX licence identifiers in every source file.

The licence is set by each project, within the OSI-approved rule: Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, LakeSoul and Vortex are all under Apache 2.0. The company that contributed a project can still lead its development and build products on it, as Databricks does with Delta Lake and Unity Catalog and Spiral with Vortex, but the name and the GitHub organisation are no longer its own.