The R Foundation is a not for profit organization working in the public interest. It has been founded by the members of the R Development Core Team in order to

• Provide support for the R project and other innovations in statistical computing. We believe that R has become a mature and valuable tool and we would like to ensure its continued development and the development of future innovations in software for statistical and computational research.
• Provide a reference point for individuals, instititutions or commercial enterprises that want to support or interact with the R development community.
• Hold and administer the copyright of R software and documentation.

R is an official part of the Free Software Foundation's GNU project, and the R Foundation has similar goals to other open source software foundations like the Apache Foundation or the GNOME Foundation.

Among the goals of the R Foundation are the support of continued development of R, the exploration of new methodology, teaching and training of statistical computing and the organization of meetings and conferences with a statistical computing orientation.