The Parrot Foundation is a non-profit organization

Non-profit organization

Nonprofit organization is neither a legal nor technical definition but generally refers to an organization that uses surplus revenues to achieve its goals, rather than distributing them as profit or dividends...

 based in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 established under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code

Internal Revenue Code

The Internal Revenue Code is the domestic portion of Federal statutory tax law in the United States, published in various volumes of the United States Statutes at Large, and separately as Title 26 of the United States Code...

.

It was formed in June 2008 to help promote the development of the Parrot

Parrot virtual machine

Parrot is a register-based process virtual machine designed to run dynamic languages efficiently. It uses just-in-time compilation for speed to reduce the interpretation overhead. It is currently possible to compile Parrot assembly language and PIR to Parrot bytecode and execute it...

 process virtual machine (Parrot VM) and related source code

Source code

In computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...

. In addition, it provides a means for companies and organizations to provide funding to Parrot VM related activities. It also licenses the Parrot VM and protects the Parrot VM intellectual property

Intellectual property

Intellectual property is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law...

.

Board of directors

The Parrot Foundation has a board of directors

Board of directors

A board of directors is a body of elected or appointed members who jointly oversee the activities of a company or organization. Other names include board of governors, board of managers, board of regents, board of trustees, and board of visitors...

, elected every year by the voting members of the foundation. The current board consists of:

• James Keenan, Chairman
• Jerry Gay, Chairman
• Andrew Whitworth, Vice President
• Jonathan Leto, Secretary
• Andrew Whitworth, Treasurer

Voting membership

In order to become a voting member of the Parrot Foundation, the following conditions must be met:

• Make at least two contributions to the project
• Nomination by at least two existing voting members
• Submittal of a signed contributor license agreement

Sponsor membership

Sponsor membership is a non-voting membership and requires a yearly financial contribution.
Current sponsor members are:

• ActiveState
  ActiveState
  ActiveState is a Canadian software company headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia. It develops, sells, and supports cross-platform development tools for dynamic languages such as Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Tcl, as well as language distributions and enterprise services...
  
  
• BBC
  BBC
  The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
  
  
• NLNet Foundation
• Mozilla Foundation
  Mozilla Foundation
  The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to support and provide leadership for the open source Mozilla project. The organization sets the policies that govern development, operates key infrastructure and controls trademarks and other intellectual property...