Lit is Joining the OpenJS Foundation!

This morning at JSConf, the OpenJS Foundation announced that Lit is officially joining as an Impact Project! We are incredibly excited to share this news with you. After a long journey working through the necessary administrative and legal processes, Lit is moving from a solely Google-owned project to a new home with the OpenJS Foundation, under a truly open governance model.

This is a huge milestone for Lit, and it's something we've been working towards for a long time. Joining the OpenJS Foundation as an Impact Project places Lit alongside other critical projects in the JavaScript ecosystem like Node.js, Electron, and Webpack. It's a recognition of the project's maturity, stability, and importance to the web platform.

This move is a continuation of Lit's evolution from a single-vendor project into a true community-driven one. Already, all project planning, design discussions, and roadmap decisions have been happening in public, with no Google-only documents or private conversations. Major technical changes are proposed and decided on via a formal RFC process, and open engineering meetings are held bi-weekly.

Now, as part of this move, all of Lit's assets, including code, documentation, websites, and the Lit brand, are being transferred to the OpenJS Foundation. This ensures that the project's future is no longer tied to a single company. The stability and longevity of Lit will now be supported by a neutral, non-profit foundation dedicated to the health of the open-source JavaScript ecosystem.

To govern the project, we are establishing a Technical Steering Committee (TSC). The founding members of the TSC include representatives that work at Google, Adobe, and Reddit, as well as long-time independent project leaders who have been instrumental to Lit's success. This structure gives critical users of Lit a real stake and a voice in the technical direction and management of the project.

The initial TSC members will include the following:

• Justin Fagnani (Independent)
• Steve Orvell (Independent)
• Jim Simon (Reddit)
• Gray Norton (Adobe)
• Kevin Schaaf (Google)
• Peter Burns (Google)

We believe this move will be incredibly positive for the Lit community. It reflects the already community-driven nature of the project, but makes it more formal and sustainable. In the past, we’ve heard that some potential contributors were hesitant to get involved with a project that was solely owned by Google. We hope that being a part of the OpenJS Foundation will open the doors to more contributors and collaborators. We're committed to cultivating a vibrant and welcoming community, and this is a major step in that direction.

Lit is already the most popular library for authoring web components, and the fifth-most downloaded web framework or web component library on npm, right behind Angular. It's used in a massive number of critical, high-impact projects, from complex web applications to high-traffic websites and cross-framework component sets.

Just a few examples include Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for Web, Reddit, MDN, The Internet Archive, Chrome DevTools and settings UI, Firefox's browser UI, The Microsoft Store, Home Assistant, Web Awesome, and tens of thousands of components at Google across YouTube, Waymo, Google Maps Platform, Labs, web.dev, Colab, Gerrit, and many more projects.

A big focus of the project for the last few years, and even more so now that we're in an independent foundation, is to grow this incredible user community into a stronger contributor community, with true community ownership. Creating a vendor-neutral TSC is just one more step on this path. We'll continue to welcome new contributors with more events, documentation, open meetings, and clear workflows; and invite more critical stakeholders to have official representation on our leadership teams. Soon, we'll be putting out a call for our first Lit community manager. Stay tuned!

We're especially excited to be part of the OpenJS Foundation's commitment to growing and maintaining critical JavaScript projects like Node.js, Express, Webpack, and Electron, and we share their mission of enabling an open and accessible web. The OpenJS Foundation is providing the Lit project guidance on formal, open governance, project support, community building, and more, and as an Impact Project, Lit will participate in the OpenJS Foundation's Cross Product Council (CPC).

Lit was created in order to help make web standards like web components easier to use. The Lit team has always been deeply involved in the web standards process, working with browser vendors, prominent web standards bodies, and the Web Components Community Group to advance the web platform. Recently, we’ve seen some huge wins, including scoped custom element registries shipping in Safari, CSS module scripts landing in Firefox, composed selection hitting baseline 2025, and the cross-scope ARIA references specification being finalized.

While we've always strived to be a distinct voice from Chrome in standards discussions, being an OpenJS Foundation project makes that distinction even clearer. Now, with a diverse TSC, we can bring even more perspectives to the table and continue to push the web forward for everyone.

This is an incredibly exciting new chapter for Lit. OpenJS is a wonderful host for us, as our missions to advance the web and JavaScript align so well. We can't wait to see what more we all build together. Thank you to everyone who has been a part of our evolution so far. The future of Lit is bright, and it's a future we'll all build together.

We invite everyone to become part of Lit's developer and user community. Whether you simply use Lit for your projects or are interested in contributing code, documentation, outreach, feedback, or good vibes, there is a way to get involved.

You can find more about the project at lit.dev and by joining our Discord server at https://lit.dev/discord/. All community members are invited to our engineering meetings that occur every other Thursday, posted on the calender here. It's a great way to connect with the project and learn how to get involved.