The Free Standards Group was an industry non-profit consortium chartered to primarily specify and drive the adoption of open source standards. It was founded in 1998.
All standards developed by the Free Standards Group (FSG) were released under open terms (the GNU Free Documentation License with no cover texts or invariant sections) and test suites, sample implementations and other software were released as free software.
On January 22, 2007, the Free Standards Group and the OSDL merged to form The Linux Foundation, narrowing their respective focuses to that of promoting Linux in competition with Microsoft Windows.
FSG responsibility for the following work groups has now transferred to The Linux Foundation:
The Free Standards Group also had individual memberships; the board of directors was elected annually by all of the membership.