Conservancy and COSM announce the Mifos Initiative
The Community for Open Source Microfinance (“COSM”), in conjunction with Software Freedom Conservancy, is proud to announce that COSM will assume full stewardship of Mifos®, an award-winning free and open source software platform for microfinance, effective immediately. Conservancy, a non-profit fiscal sponsor for Free Software projects and the previous non-profit home of the Mifos project, will assist in COSM in the transition and will donate all the Mifos copyrights, trademarks, and domain names to COSM.
In turn, COSM plans to reunite the project and brand under the name, Mifos Initiative, and will serve as both the new non-profit home for the Mifos project and as the community hub for developers, microfinance institutions, vendors, development consultants, and users that together comprise the Mifos community.
We’re excited to step into the future under the Mifos banner, said Craig Chelius, Executive Director of the newly-renamed Mifos Initiative. We’d like to thank Conservancy for shepherding the Mifos project during this transition, and we’re ready to lead all aspects of the movement to enable the use of open source technology for financial inclusion as a development tool to help the world’s poor.
We are proud that the Mifos project flourished during its tenure under Conservancy’s mentorship, said Bradley M. Kuhn, Conservancy’s Executive Director. Thanks to the arduous work of Craig Chelius, Edward Cable, and the whole team at the Mifos Initiative, we can now hand off the project to a vibrant home, and we look forward to maintaining a friendly relationship with a fellow public charity dedicated to developing freely-licensed software.
About Mifos
Originally created in 2006 by the Grameen Foundation, Mifos is an award-winning open source technology platform to effectively and efficiently deliver financial services to the poor. It is currently being used by 50 microfinance institutions serving more than 1.2 million poor clients around the world. The Community for Open Source Microfinance completely rewrote Mifos as an open platform for financial services with a suite of simple configurable apps hosted in the cloud, immediately available for deployment worldwide. This next generation platform, Mifos X, provides all the functionality needed to deliver a full range of financial services via any distribution channel while tracking and monitoring the social impact.
About the Mifos Initiative
The Mifos Initiative, formerly known as the Community for Open Source Microfinance, is a 501(c)(3) public charity leading a community of financial service providers, technology specialists, financial services experts and open source developers working together to grow the Mifos open source platform for financial services. Its goal is to speed the elimination of poverty by enabling financial service providers to more effectively and efficiently deliver responsible financial services to the world’s 2.5 billion poor and unbanked. To achieve its goal, the Mifos Initiative is building a global network of specialists and community members to promote and support the deployment of the Mifos platform and other open source financial inclusion technologies. For more information, visit Mifos and the Mifos Initiative.
About Software Freedom Conservancy
Software Freedom Conservancy is a non-profit organization that helps promote, improve, develop and defend Free, Libre and Open Source software projects. Conservancy is a home to twenty-eight software projects, each supported by a dedicated community of volunteers, developers, and users. Conservancy’s projects include some of the most widely used software systems in the world across many application areas, including educational software deployed in schools around the globe, embedded software systems deployed in most consumer electronic devices, distributed version control developer tools, integrated library services systems, and widely used graphics and art programs. A full list of Conservancy’s projects are on its website. Conservancy provides to these projects the necessary infrastructure and non-profit support services to enable the project’s communities to focus on what they do best: creating innovative software and advancing computing for the public’s benefit.
