The MetaBrainz Foundation has been set up to build community maintained databases and make them available in the public domain or under Creative Commons licenses. Our data is gathered by volunteers, and verified by a voting system to make sure it is consistent and correct. All non-commercial use is free, but commercial users are asked to pay for regular updates of the data in order to help fund the project. We encourage all data users to contribute to the data gathering process so that our data can be as comprehensive as possible. In this way, we hope to prevent what often happens: needing to duplicate the work of compiling these databases.
Currently the MetaBrainz Foundation's sole project is MusicBrainz. MusicBrainz is a database of music and musicians. It started as a way to catalogue CDs, so it is biased towards popular music, and is not so good at storing information about, for example, classical works. There are also proposals to start other databases, for example MovieBrainz, about films.
The MetaBrainz Foundation is a 501.(c).3 tax-exempt non-profit based in San Luis Obispo, California.