NADA Foundation

About the foundation

A neutral, public standard for code in every language.

NADA is a non-profit foundation. It stewards a single thing: an open standard and an always-fresh dataset for showing programming vocabulary in any human language — so a person can read and write real code in the language they already think in, and the program still runs everywhere, unchanged.

Stewarded by a Dutch non-profit foundation (Stichting). The standard belongs to no company.

The mission

Keep the world’s programming vocabulary free, public, and current.

Almost all code is written in English words, and roughly five in six people do not read English well. The foundation exists to remove that barrier permanently — not with a product, but with shared infrastructure: a neutral mapping of programming terms into every human language, maintained as a public good and kept fresh as languages and ecosystems change.

  • 135 human languages mapped
  • 19 programming languages localized
  • 17,242 terms mined across 36 ecosystems

Coverage varies by language; 130 are usable today and 79 are strong. The numbers move because the work is maintained, not finished.

A standard, not a product

In the tradition of Unicode, the W3C, and the IETF.

The most durable parts of computing are the ones no single company owns. Text encoding, the web, the internet’s protocols — each is a public standard, kept by a neutral body, that everyone can build on and no one can capture. The foundation positions NADA the same way: the vocabulary of programming, made into shared infrastructure rather than a feature.

A standard earns its trust by being boring, neutral, and the same for everyone.

That is the whole posture: infrastructure, not branding. The standard is text and data anyone can read; the foundation’s job is to keep it accurate and keep it open.

Governance & stewardship

Held by a foundation, answerable to its mission.

Who holds a standard matters as much as the standard itself. NADA is stewarded so that neutrality is structural, not a promise.

The steward A Dutch non-profit foundation (Stichting) holds and maintains the standard and the dataset. A foundation, not a company, is what lets the work stay neutral: it answers to its mission, not to shareholders.
The board Stewardship sits with a board bound by the foundation’s charter. The legal setup is done; the board and registration are published as they are finalized. [TO CONFIRM: board members, registration number, registered office]
The mandate One job, narrowly drawn: keep the language data accurate, public, and free, and keep the standard independent of any one company, government, or product.
The record Decisions that change the standard are made in the open and recorded, so anyone can see what changed, when, and why. A governance memo is available on request.

The licensing model

Open where it must be, protected where it counts.

The data is free for anyone to use, the tools are open to inspect, and the name is protected so the standard cannot be quietly enclosed. Each layer carries the licence that fits its job.

  • Language data

    CC-BY

    The dataset — every term mapped into every human language — is free for anyone to use, including inside a paid product, with no conditions beyond attribution.

  • Pipeline

    AGPL

    The tools that mine, build, and check the dataset are open. Anyone can inspect them and confirm the work is honest and reproducible.

  • Engine

    MPL [TO CONFIRM: engine licence is MPL]

    The runtime that reads code in one language and writes it back unchanged is permissively licensed, so it can live inside open and commercial tools alike.

  • The name & mark

    NADA™ + conformance mark

    The trademark and the conformance mark are the moat. Anyone may build their own version — but only work that meets the standard may carry the NADA name. No single company can quietly fork the standard and call its private copy the real one.

The result is a public standard no single company controls — open data, open tools, works anywhere — with a name that can only be earned, never taken. See how it stays open →

The foundation & nada.build

The standard is free. The product pays for it.

The foundation keeps the standard and the data; nada.build is the commercial product built on top of it — a free app and a VS Code add-on that show code in your own language as you read and write it. Revenue from the paid product funds the open work, so the language data stays free for everyone, including for products that compete with nada.build.

The line is deliberate. The foundation does not sell anything; it stewards a public good. The company does not own the standard; it builds on the same open data anyone else can use. Commercial use funds open access — that is the engine that keeps the whole thing alive without depending on any one funder.

Get the NADA app Funders & institutions: start a conversation →

hello@nadalang.org · governance memo on request.