ICU joins the Unicode Consortium

ICU Project <http://site.icu-project.org/>Today we are welcoming the ICU
project into the Unicode Consortium.

Every smartphone and laptop uses the Unicode encoding and Unicode CLDR
data for language support: from Arabic to Japanese to Zulu --- and even
plain English. The Unicode Consortium provides the data, but has not
provided software to directly use that data, until now.

The ICU (International Components for Unicode) project has long provided
software that implements the Unicode data and algorithms. ICU is a
mature, very widely deployed set of C/C++ and Java software libraries,
open-sourced since 1999 under the stewardship of IBM. When you see a
date or number written in your language on your smartphone, for example,
or a list of sorted names, the formatting and sorting are done with ICU.

There has long been a close working relationship between the various
Unicode Consortium committees and the ICU team, with many people working
on Unicode projects as well as ICU. That has ensured that Unicode data
and algorithms can be effectively and quickly implemented.

IBM made the decision to transfer ICU to the Unicode Consortium so that
ICU could benefit from the formal and open governance that the Unicode
Consortium offers. "IBM has a long history in our commitment to open
standards as a driver of innovation for our customers worldwide," said
Helena Chapman, IBM Globalization Executive. By moving ICU under the
Unicode Consortium, it provides a cross-industry, open source
collaboration that will drive greater consistency and interoperability
across computing platforms to the benefit of global technology users
world-wide. IBM has been an active member of the Unicode Consortium
since its inception, and is pleased to see this further consolidation of
foundational open source globalization standards.

The ICU team has become a new Consortium technical committee, along with
the other Unicode committees
<http://www.unicode.org/consortium/consort.html>. ICU will be released
under the Unicode open-source license (similar to the previous license),
just like the Unicode Character Database and the CLDR data. For users of
ICU, we'll try to make this transition as smooth as possible.

The Unicode Consortium and the ICU team would like to thank IBM for many
years of project stewardship, as well as for major past and ongoing
contributions to the project.

For more information, see http://site.icu-project.org/

http://blog.unicode.org/2016/05/icu-joins-unicode-consortium.html

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