The Open Microscopy Environment (OME) is a collaborative effort among academic laboratories and commercial entities. They provide open tools for data management in biological light microscopy, which are designed to work with existing commercial software. All OME formats and software are free, and the source code is available under the GNU General Public License or through a commercial license from Glencoe Software. The OME consortium was awarded a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award in 2011, which supported the development of the OME Data Model, Bio-Formats file translation library, and OMERO application. OME offers products such as OMERO for viewing, organizing, analyzing, and sharing data, Bio-Formats for reading and writing microscopy file formats, and OME Files for implementing the data model and file formats. They also provide software for managing, visualizing, and analyzing microscopy images and associated metadata.