OSGeo’s mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data.
Read the Initial press release from 06 March 2006.
Checkout the history of the early days https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/History
Read the Blog post of Markus Neteler one of the founding members: Celebrating 18 Years Of The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo)
