The OpenJS Foundation is thrilled to announce that Lit is joining as an Impact Project! Lit and its assets are being donated by Google Open Source. With the move to the Foundation, the project has been in the process of building out a multi-vendor Technical Steering Committee to govern the project, with seats filled by employees of Adobe, Reddit, Google, as well as independent contributors.

Lit is a simple library for building fast, lightweight web UI components based on the W3C web components standards. At the core, Lit is a component base class that eliminates the need for boilerplate and provides reactive state, scoped styles, and a declarative template system that's tiny, fast and expressive.

Lit is the most popular library for building standards-based web components, and is the 5th most popular web framework overall, measured by npm downloads. Google's internal codebase contains in excess of 10,000 Lit custom elements across dozens of teams. Bringing this project into the OpenJS Foundation provides expanded opportunities for community collaboration and neutral governance.

"We are incredibly excited about the path forward for Lit as it prepares to join the OpenJS Foundation. At Google, we believe deeply in the power of open source and vendor-neutral foundations to foster vibrant ecosystems and drive innovation for the long term," said Dessie Sadrzadeh at Google. "Bringing Lit to the OpenJS Foundation will further empower the web components community, encourage broader collaboration, and ensure Lit continues to thrive as a simple, fast, and interoperable solution for developers building for the future of the web. We look forward to seeing Lit's impact grow even stronger within the OpenJS family, benefiting the entire JavaScript ecosystem."

“Lit is leading the way for efficient standards-based web components and we are excited for them to join the OpenJS Foundation,” said Robin Bender Ginn, Executive Director, OpenJS Foundation. “By working together with our broader communities, we hope to build a more connected and accessible web for developers everywhere.”

Companies like Adobe are utilizing Lit for projects like Photoshop and Illustrator for Web, and for Spectrum, which is an implementation of Spectrum designed to work with any web framework. Reddit also heavily leverages Lit, using it to power the majority of its modern web frontend, including the experiences on Reddit.com for both desktop and mobile web.

By donating Lit to the OpenJS Foundation, they join our other projects as a part of the Cross Project Council (CPC). The CPC operates openly and transparently, conducting discussions and documenting decisions in the openjs-foundation/cross-project-council repo. 

“We love Lit’s web standards-based approach that drives interoperability and enables portability of components; it aligns perfectly with our mission to support the growth of an open JavaScript ecosystem and with our strong ties to standards organizations like W3C and Ecma International,” said Tobie Langel, Vice Chair of the OpenJS Cross Project Council and OpenJS Board Director. The Cross Project Council is thrilled to welcome Lit as an incubating project at the OpenJS Foundation and support its growth into a multi-vendor Impact project.

OpenJS Project Lifecycle

Just like all OpenJS projects, Lit is entering the foundation as an incubating project while they complete the onboarding checklist process. 

There are four different types of projects hosted by the OpenJS Foundation: Impact projects are generally large, mature projects. At-Large projects are new, stable projects with minimal needs. Incubation projects are in the process of joining the OpenJS Foundation. And Emeritus projects have completed their lifecycle and are retired. In addition, the CPC oversees an incubation process for projects which seek to be hosted by the OpenJS Foundation.

To find out how your project can join the OpenJS Foundation see: https://openjsf.org/projects/

About OpenJS Foundation

The OpenJS Foundation is committed to supporting the healthy growth of the JavaScript ecosystem and web technologies by providing a neutral organization to host and sustain projects and collaboratively fund activities for the benefit of the community at large. The OpenJS Foundation is currently home to 39 open source JavaScript projects, including Appium, Dojo, Electron, jQuery, Node.js, and webpack. It is supported by 30 corporate and end-user members, including GoDaddy, Google, IBM, Intel, Joyent, Microsoft, and Netflix. These members recognize the interconnected nature of the JavaScript ecosystem and the importance of providing a central home for projects which represent significant shared value. 

About Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, hardware, standards, and data. Linux Foundation projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, ONAP, OpenChain, OpenSSF, PyTorch, RISC-V, SPDX, Zephyr, and more. The Linux Foundation focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org. The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

About Google Open Source

Google believes that open source is good for everyone and has invested deeply to unlock innovation for customers through Open Source. By being open and freely available, it encourages collaboration from the community and accelerates innovation.