Open Design Alliance (ODA) today announced it has moved its official business location to Phoenix, Arizona. The alliance says the consolidation will allow it to “further reduce administrative cost and increase spend on the development of Teigha, the ODA software development platform.”

The ODA was founded in 1998 as the OpenDWG Alliance, a Washington non-profit co-operation. Since 2000 it has been operating from Phoenix as an Arizona foreign corporation. With this move the ODA is now an Arizona non-profit corporation and no longer has a registration in the state of Washington. The move also offers benefits to ODA members, especially to those in the Founding and the recently announced Corporate Founding levels of membership. Under the new arrangement the license granted to Founding members to use and distribute Teigha is independent of the ODA’s existence. The ODA says this new arrangement gives Founding members long term security to continue developing products using Teigha. In practical terms, it fixes the accident of birth, in which the ODA was registered as a Washington State corporation but had its office in Phoenix. Also, better to sue or be sued in Arizona than Washington State … not that we are suggesting anybody plans to do that anytime soon.