The story
The OpenStreetMap Foundation was registered in England and Wales on 22 August 2006 as a company limited by guarantee. In 2007, it held the first State of the Map conference in Manchester.
In October 2009, the foundation announced that its members, rather than the OpenStreetMap contributors at large, would vote on changing OpenStreetMap's data license from Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike to the Open Database License.
In 2014, the foundation began accepting corporate memberships in an "associate member" (nonvoting) category. The initial corporate members were Geofabrik, Geotab, Naver, NextGIS, and Mapbox. In 2017, the foundation started giving corporate sponsors of a certain level to have a seat on the advisory board. In 2018, GlobalLogic was implicated in a coordinated effort to sign up employees as individual members.
Active contributors membership program was introduced in August 2020. As per this active contributors to OpenStreetMap through editing (at least 42 active days in the latest period of one year) or off-line activities can apply for free of cost membership. They will have voting rights for electing board members.
In June 2021, the foundation stated that the effects of Brexit have prompted them to consider a move back into the European Union due to issues with database rights, difficulties with getting charitable status for the foundation, and the increasing difficulty of using PayPal and banking in the United Kingdom. The foundation has not announced the location of its new headquarters. As of February 2024, the candidates for relocation are Belgium and Luxembourg.
By the end of 2022, the foundation had recognized 18 local chapters worldwide, including OSM Austria, supporting regional growth and community engagement.
From Wikipedia’s article on OpenStreetMap Foundation, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4