A shorter and more personal take on the recent news, first published on bitol.io.

Thank you to all the Bitol users, fans, and LF AI & Data for making this possible. Last week, Bitol graduated.

Bitol graduated from the Linux Foundation AI & Data, bringing it to the highest level of open-source projects within the foundation.

A unanimous TAC vote made it possible and wiped the suffering of arguing about the name of a property at 11 pm on Slack.

Scorecard

Graduating is a serious process with strict rules; here are Bitol’s results:

  • Sandbox (Sept 2023) → Incubation (Nov 2024) → Graduated (July 2026). Data-standards years are apparently longer than dog years.

  • Code contributions from 11+ organizations, more than the 5 required. Actian, Entropy Data, Data Catering, Pickle, enChoice, Alliander, Agile Lab, Datashift, Protective Life, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, ALH Gruppe, and way more.

  • 1,053 GitHub stars on ODCS alone, 1,166 combined with ODPS (and it keeps growing)

  • OpenSSF Gold Badge (we had Silver at Incubation).

  • 480+ commits in 12 straight months, every month.

  • Two sibling-project collaborations (Egeria and Unity Catalog embed ODCS; Unity Catalog embeds ODPS too), against a bar of one.

  • A two-thirds vote requirement at both TAC and Governing Board. Try getting two-thirds of anyone to agree on lunch. We got unanimous.

The scorecard as a postcard.

The number I keep re-reading

Organizations adopting ODCS and ODPS went from 9 to 114 in fourteen months. Thirteen times. Employees touched went from 1.1 million to 4.5 million. Countries went from 3 to 21. And, per the BARC 2026 study, 61% of organizations now report using data contracts at all, with 41% of those practitioners specifically on ODCS.

Linux Foundation Graduation

It is not a badge someone slaps on a repo because the vibes are good. It’s a checklist with teeth: contributor diversity, star thresholds, security posture held and re-earned, sustained commit activity, cross-project collaboration, a named technical lead on the TAC (hi, that’s me now), and a supermajority vote at two separate governing bodies. Clear all of it, or you don’t graduate. We cleared all of it.

Teamwork at Its Best

A twelve-person TSC that meets monthly and a working group that meets twice a week is at the root of this success: Andrea Gioia, Andrew Jones, Andy Petrella, Atanas Iliev, Diego Carvallo, Dirk Van de Poel, Jochen Christ, Martin Meermeyer, Patrick Beitsma, Simon Harrer, Tom de Wolf, and me, currently holding the gavel. Eleven companies, three flavors of stakeholder, nobody steering alone.

We also wrote the industry’s working definition of a data product. It’s on Wikipedia now. Nobody tells you that counts as a critical milestone. It needed to be before we created ODPS.

So: thank you to the TSC for the reviews, the respectful exchanges, and the Slack threads and meetings at hours no reasonable person should be awake for. Thank you to the TAC and the Governing Board for scrutiny rather than a rubber stamp.

The standard is finding its way into production, one contract at a time. It just got a lot harder to ignore. Full announcement, RFC trail, and the fine print: bitol.io/bitol-graduates. Come build with us: bitol.io and chat on Slack.