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About Us

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation or O|B|F is a non profit, volunteer run organization focused on supporting open source programming in bioinformatics.

The foundation grew out of the volunteer projects Bioperl, BioJava and Biopython and was formally incorporated in order to handle our modest requirements of hardware ownership, domain name management and funding for conferences and workshops.The Foundation does not participate directly in the development or structure of the open source work, but as the members of the foundation are drawn from the member projects, there is clear commonality of direction and purpose. Occasionally the O|B|F directors may make announcements about our direction or purpose (a recent one was on the licensing of academic software) when the board feels there is a need to clarify matters, but in general we prefer to remain simply the administrative support organization for our member projects.

Our main activities are:

• Underwriting and supporting the BOSC conferences
• Organizing and supporting developer-centric "hackathon" events
• Managing our servers, colocation facilities, bank account & other assets

We are incorporated in the state of Delaware, USA as a not-for-profit company.

BOSC

Bioinformatics Open Source Conference or BOSC is held annually in conjunction with ISCB's meeting ISMB. We will be holding BOSC 2006 at ISMB 2006 in Fortaleza, Brazil.

See some of the Past BOSC conferences.