The newly announced JS Foundation, formed with help from the Linux Foundation is an expansion of the jQuery foundation. Intended as an umbrella project to support the JavaScript ecosystem, the JS Foundation has IBM and Samsung among its initial members.

According to its launch announcement:

The JS Foundation is committed to help JavaScript application and server-side projects cultivate best practices and policies that promote high quality standards and broad, diverse contributions for long-term sustainability. Today the JS Foundation touts a new open, technical governance structure and also announces a Mentorship Program to help encourage a culture of collaboration and sustainability throughout the JavaScript community. Initial projects being welcomed into the mentorship program include: Appium, Interledger.js, JerryScript, Mocha, Moment.js, Node-RED and webpack.

Other projects in the JS Foundation, - jQuery, jQuery Mobile, jQuery UI, Dojo Toolkit, Lodash, Chassis, ESLint, Esprima, Globalize, Grunt, PEP, QUnit, RequireJS and Sizzle - were already part of the jQuery Foundation which had merged with the Dojo foundation in September 2015.

At launch the JS Foundation has several partners:

The University of Westminster is also an Associate Partner.

Kris Borchers, who was jQuery Foundation Executive Director now assumes the same role for the JS Foundation, explains his viewpoint on this expansion:

"The JS Foundation aims to support a vast array of technologies that complement projects throughout the entire JavaScript ecosystem. We welcome any projects, organizations or developers looking to help bolster the JavaScript community and inspire the next wave of growth for application development.”

The JS Foundation joins a large number of Linux Foundation open source projects across a wide range of sectors including automotive, cloud and the Internet of Things. Last year the Node.js foundation, which healed the rift between the breakaway io.js and the original Node.js community under the auspices of the Linux Foundation and now it anticipates partnering with the new foundation.

According to Mikeal Rogers, community manager of Node.js Foundation:

"The JS Foundation is creating a center of gravity for the open source JavaScript ecosystem. [It] will drive broad adoption and ongoing development of key JavaScript solutions and related technologies, and it will facilitate collaboration within the JavaScript development community." 

IBM is now a Platinum partner of both the Node.js Foundation and the JS Foundation and a blog post from Angel Diaz, IBM's Vice President of Cloud Technology and Architecture, gives the information:

"JS Foundation will formalize its partnership with the Node.js Foundation to collaborate and provide mentorship for frameworks that depend on Node.js. This powerful partnership benefits the entire JavaScript and Node.js community by formalizing and amplifying these foundations’ core strengths, both based on JavaScript technology." 

IBM's Node-RED, its visual tool for wiring things together in IoT is one of the new entrants into the JS Foundation's mentoring program. The other Platinum partner, Samsung, brings with it JerryScript, its lightweight JavaScript interpreter intended to run on microcontrollers as a JavaScript engine for the Internet of Things. 

This recurrence of IoT appears not to be a coincidence, with Borchers saying in the launch annoucement: 

JavaScript is a pervasive technology, blurring the boundaries between server, client, cloud and IoT. 

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